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special issue 2015 www.revistapesquisa.fapesp.br

An abundance of water depends on intact forests to form rain

and maintain the quality of aquifers

Object of desire

Teeth from a deer suggest that humans were present in the state of Piauí over 20,000 years ago

Visible light of the Sun, in addition to UV rays, may cause skin cancer

Middle and lower classes are living closer to each other while elites occupy more exclusive zones in São Paulo city

Brazilian Artur Ávila wins the Fields Medal, the most important prize in mathematics

2 | SEPTIEMBRE DE 2015

pESQUISA FApESp | 3

SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL pOLICY

20 BioenergyA conference shows that biofuel expansion requires the support of public policies to be sustained at a global level 24 Scientometrics A scientific paper describes the methodology used to evaluate the Biota-FAPESP Program

26 Collaboration Researchers discuss partnerships in search of drugs to treat diseases that are of little interest to pharmaceutical companies

6 COVER The water shortage alarming Brazil is closely related to its rainforests

photo léo ramos

14 INTERVIEWARTuR ÁvilAThe Brazilian receives the Fields Medal, the most important international mathematics award

SECtIoNS

4 Letter from the Editor74 Art

SCIENCE

30 Botanyvines are remodeling the Amazon Region, and bamboos are remodeling the Atlantic Forest

34 Biochemistryvisible light, in addition to ultraviolet radiation, may also cause skin cancer

37 ArcheologyTeeth from a deer found alongside human bones inside a cave in the state of Piauí suggest that humans were present in the region more than 20,000 years ago

40 obituaryluiz Hildebrando Pereira da Silva was one of the most respected parasitology experts in the world

42 GeologyGreat blocks of rock from different ages and origins combined to form the South Atlantic margins

46 AstronomyMeteorologists want to know why winds are so strong on venus and Titan

48 physicsBrazilians discover how to measure energy variations in atomic nuclei

TECHNOLOGY

52 Computer ScienceAdvances in eScience are changing the traditional way of conducting scientific research

56 New materialsFoam consisting of graphene oxide and boron nitride is lightweight and tough and returns to its original shape after compression

58 BiotechnologySkin substitutes could be used as grafts to treat burns and severe lesions

62 Agricultureusing leguminous plants as fertilizer can increase sugarcane production by 35%

HUMANITIES

64 Society A study of 100 years of social housing in Brazil uncovers high-quality projects during the vargas era

70 SociologyPopulation figures show that communities on the periphery of Greater São Paulo have become more heterogeneous, with the middle and lower classes living closer to each other, while the elites still occupy the more exclusive zones

www.REviSTAPESquiSA.FAPESP.BR

SpECIAL ISSuE NovEmBEr 2015

4 | special issue November 2015

Letter from the editor

José GoldemberGpresident

eduardo moacyr KrieGervice-president

Board of trustees

carmino antonio de souza, eduardo moacyr KrieGer, fernando ferreira costa, João fernando Gomes de oliveira, João Grandino rodas, José GoldemberG, maria José soares mendes Giannini, marilza vieira cunha rudGe, José de souza martins, Pedro luiz barreiros Passos, Pedro WonGtschoWsKi, suely vilela samPaio

executive Board

José arana varelapresident director

carlos henrique de brito cruzscientific director

Joaquim J. de camarGo enGleradministrative director

editoriaL Boardcarlos henrique de brito cruz (President), caio túlio costa, eugênio bucci, fernando reinach, José eduardo Krieger, luiz davidovich, marcelo Knobel, maria hermínia tavares de almeida, marisa lajolo, maurício tuffani, mônica teixeira

scientific committeeluiz henrique lopes dos santos (President), anamaria aranha camargo, carlos eduardo negrão, fabio Kon, francisco antônio bezerra coutinho, Joaquim J. de camargo engler, José arana varela, José Goldemberg, José roberto de frança arruda, José roberto Postali Parra, lucio angnes, marie-anne van sluys, mário José abdalla saad, Paula montero, roberto marcondes cesar Júnior, sérgio robles reis queiroz, Wagner caradori do amaral, Walter colli

scientific coordinatorluiz henrique lopes dos santos

editor in chief alexandra ozorio de almeida

managing editor neldson marcolin

editors fabrício marques (Policy), márcio ferrari (Humanities), marcos de oliveira (Technology), ricardo zorzetto (Science); carlos fioravanti and marcos Pivetta (Special editors); bruno de Pierro (Assistant editor)

transLator transconsult, fairfax, va – Kim olson

art mayumi okuyama (Editor), ana Paula campos (Infographic editor), alvaro felippe Jr., Júlia cherem rodrigues and maria cecilia felli (Assistents)

PhotograPhers eduardo cesar, léo ramos

eLetronic media fabrício marques (Coordinator) internet Pesquisa FAPESP onlinemaria Guimarães (Editor)rodrigo de oliveira andrade (Reporter) renata oliveira do Prado (Social media)

rádio Pesquisa Brasilbiancamaria binazzi (Producer)

contriButors catarina bessel, evanildo da silveira, fabio otubo, Gilberto stam, igor zolnerkevic, Jayne oliveira, Pedro franz, Pedro hamdan, sandro castelli, valter rodrigues, yuri vasconcelos, zé vicente

Printer editora Gráficos burti ltda.

the rePrinting of texts and Photos, in whoLe or in Part, is ProhiBited

without Prior authorization

PesQuisa faPesP rua Joaquim antunes, no 727, 10o andar, ceP 05415-012, Pinheiros, são Paulo-sP – brasil

faPesP rua Pio Xi, no 1.500, ceP 05468-901, alto da lapa, são Paulo-sP – brasil

dePartment for economic develoPment, science and technoloGy

sÃo PauLo state government

issn 1519-8774

são Paulo research foundation

w e are pleased to present this special issue of Pesquisa FAPESP in English. This edition is composed of a selection of reports that were originally published in the Portuguese version of

our monthly magazine between September 2014 and February 2015 (issues 223 to 228).

The lead article (p. 6) discusses the water shortage that currently affects southeastern Brazil, which is an increasingly global problem. Research shows the role of the Amazon in creating a ‘vertical river’ that extracts water from the Atlantic Ocean and the soil, feeding the clouds and helping to change the direction of the winds that circulate water across South America. Research from the INPE (National Ins-titute for Space Research) shows a different circulation pattern that deviates from the predicted weather pattern. Deforestation adds to the complexity of this problem, altering pressure patterns and possi-bly causing a decline in the moisture-laden winds that blow from the ocean to the continent.

This edition offers a profile of the mathematician Artur Ávila (p. 14), the first Brazilian and the first South American to receive the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics. A specialist in dy-namical systems, Ávila is based at the IMPA (Institute for Pure and Ap-plied Mathematics) in Rio de Janeiro and the CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research) in Paris. This carioca shared the award with three other winners, one of whom is the first woman to receive this honor.

Water, math and neglected

diseases

alexandra ozorio de almeida

editor in chief

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In the interview featured here, Ávila explains his working process. Reading books and papers are not a priority for him; he prefers to work in collaboration with other researchers who are specialists in certain areas of interest. He learns what is most important from them and applies this knowledge toward tackling the given pro-blem that he is trying to solve.

Potential cooperation in the development and delivery of new treatments for neglected diseases such as Chagas disease, visceral leish-maniasis, malaria and sleeping sickness was discussed at the FAPESP headquarters in No-vember 2014 (p. 26). In addition to FAPESP, the other participants were the Royal Society of Chemistry of the United Kingdom and inter-national organizations, such as the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative and the Medicines for Malaria Venture. Among the conclusions of the meeting were that Brazil has a great deal to offer in finding new drugs, in areas such as orga-nic chemistry and molecular biology. However, a considerable effort is still necessary to build

connections between research groups and to create incentives for international collaboration in this area in Brazil.

On the subject of neglected diseases, Pesquisa FAPESP pays homage to the memory of a great scientist, Luiz Hildebrando Pereira da Silva, one of the most respected parasitologists specialized in tropical medicine worldwide (p. 40). Luiz Hildebrando, as he was known, spent most of his career at the Pasteur Institute in Paris as a political exile, where he conducted important research on the molecular biology of malaria. After retiring from the Pasteur Institute in 1996, he returned to Brazil and continued to manage research programs in the Amazon, where he was also successful in reducing the number of malaria cases in the region. Luiz Hildebrando passed away in September of 2014, at the age of 86, having lived a full life that was dedica-ted to science and to improving the well-being of humankind.

Various other features can also be found in this issue. Enjoy!

currents of water vapor that form over the amazon rain forest export rains to southern brazil


The water shortage alarming Brazil is

closely related to its forests

Rain dance

COVER

Changes in the volume and frequency of rainfall and the misuse of water supplies are among the factors drying up the pipes in parts of brazil

TexT Maria Guimarães PhoTos Léo Ramos

PUBLIsheD In DecemBer 2014

pESQUISA FApESp | 7

T he Amazon is not just the largest tropical rain forest remaining in the world. This endless span of green intersected by winding rivers of vary-ing sizes and colors is also not just the home of an incredible diversity of animals and plants.

The Amazon rain forest is also an engine capable of chang-ing the direction of the winds and a pump that sucks water from the air over the Atlantic Ocean and the soil, circulating it over South America and carrying for a long distance the rainfall the residents of São Paulo now long for. How well this pump operates, however, depends on the maintenance of the forest, the Brazilian portion of which, by 2013, had lost 763,000 square kilometers (km2) of its original area, which is the equivalent of the three states of São Paulo. An-tonio Donato Nobre, a researcher at the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), is not pointing a finger at the culprits. What matters to him is the reversal of this process and not just stopping deforestation but restoring the forest. In the report The Future Climate of the Amazon (released in late October, 2014), he states that the only reason not to take immediate action to reduce deforestation is ignorance of scientific knowledge. For him, the way forward is to edu-cate the public. “Now is a good time because the taps are running dry,” he says.

In his report, drawn from the analysis of approximately 200 scientific works, he shows that every day, the Amazon

Basin forest produces 20 billion metric tons of water (20 tril-lion liters). That amount is more than the 17 billion metric tons that the Amazon River pours into the Atlantic Ocean each day. This “vertical river” is what feeds the clouds and helps to change the direction of the winds. Nobre says that maps of the winds over the Atlantic show that, in the South-ern Hemisphere and at low altitudes, the air moves northwest toward the Equator. “In the Amazon, the forest deviates from that order,” he says. “During part of the year, the moisture-laden trade winds come from the Northern Hemisphere and converge to the west/southwest, entering South America.”

This circulation pattern violates a weather paradigm that says that winds should blow from regions with colder surfaces to those with warmer surfaces. “In the Amazon, all year they go from warm, the equatorial Atlantic, to cold, the forest,” he says. A partnership with Anastasia Makarieva and Victor Gorshkov, two scientists with the Nuclear Physics Institute of Petersburg, has helped to explain the meteorological phe-nomena of the Amazon from a physical point of view. In an article published in the February 2014 issue of the Journal of Hydrometeorology, they assert, based on theoretical analyses confirmed by empirical observations, that deforestation is altering the pressure patterns and may be causing a decline in the moisture-laden winds coming from the ocean to the continent. The group analyzed data from 28 weather stations in two areas of Brazil and noted that the winds coming from

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the Amazon rain forest carry more water and are associated with higher rainfall rates than winds coming from deforested areas that arrive at the same station.

This phenomenon occurs, the researchers say, because of the biotic pump of moisture, a theory proposed by the Russian duo in 2007 to explain the dynamics of winds driven by forests. This idea complements the description by José An-tonio Marengo (a climatologist and, at the time, an INPE researcher) of how the Amazon exports rain to the more southern regions of South Amer-ica. The biotic pump theory applies an unusual physics to meteorology and postulates that the condensation of water, promoted by the tran-spiration of the forest, reduces the atmospheric pressure that sucks the air currents laden with water from sea to land.

The reasoning behind the influence of con-densation on winds was presented in an article published in 2013 by Anastasia and

Gorshkov, in partnership with Nobre and oth-er collaborators, in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, one of the most important journals in the field. Through a series of equations, they demonstrated that the water vapor released in-to the atmosphere through forest transpiration generates, upon condensation, a flow capable of propelling winds over large distances. According to Nobre, the new physics of condensation they proposed generated a dispute among meteorolo-gists, even during the review of the article. The principal equation of the work was furiously discussed on scientific blogs. These attempts to discredit the new model failed, and the work was published. Nobre can explain the controversy. “The new physics attributes to condensation a basic and central phenomenon of how the atmo-sphere operates, an effect contrary to what was previously believed,” he says. “Textbooks on the subject will have to be rewritten.”

To explain the scope of the problematic dia-logue between theoretical physicists and me-teorologists, Nobre says that physics develops its understanding of atmospheric phenomena based on the fundamental laws of nature, while meteorology does it largely based on observations of past climate patterns, whose statistical data are absorbed into mathematical models. Such models are very good at representing observa-tions of climate fluctuations but fail when there are significant changes in the pattern.

This is now the case, when a new context—caused by deforestation, global changes in climate or other factors—is generating unexpected weath-er phenomena for certain regions, such as more torrential rains and more extensive droughts. Physical theory is correct where past extrapo-

lations err; therefore, it is necessary, he says, to build new climate models that collect the physi-cal data at the center of meteorological efforts.

The timing is now crucial because the Ama-zon’s climate is changing. The years 2005 and 2010 were marked by major droughts in this re-gion. “Prior to this, the Amazon had a wet sea-son and a wetter season, but now there is a dry season,” says Nobre. The damage to the forest caused by these droughts was not a fatal blow because the Amazon can regenerate, but the ac-cumulated damage could gradually erode this regenerative capacity. An important effect pre-viously noted (predicted 20 years ago by climate models) is an extended dry season, which has undermined agricultural production in parts of Mato Grosso State. The major concern is when the forest reaches a tipping point, where it can no longer produce enough rain to supply itself. Models that take into account climate and veg-etation indicate that the tipping point will be reached when 40% of the original forest is lost, a number about which there is no consensus. Ac-cording to Nobre’s report, 20% of the forest has been cut and 20% has been altered to the point of losing some characteristic properties.

If the biotic pump theory is correct, the effects of this tipping point are likely to be more severe than the savannization proposed by Carlos No-bre, also a climatologist and the older brother of Antonio Nobre (see Pesquisa FAPESP Issue No. 167). “If the forest loses its ability to bring mois-ture from the ocean, rain in the region may cease altogether,” says Antonio Nobre. Without water to sustain a savannah, desertification could oc-cur in the Amazon. If this occurs, the scenario he envisions for Brazil’s South and Southeast could be similar to other regions at the same latitude, turning them into deserts.

Antonio Nobre does not say too much about Sao Paulo. “My report is about the Amazon.” However, he believes that the drought in São Paulo is not isolated from what is happening in the North. In his view, it was possible to devas-tate much of the Atlantic Forest without experi-encing a reduction in rainfall because the Ama-zon was able to make up for the lack of water in the local atmosphere. However, that no longer seems to occur. His report is an opportunity for him to urge that not only the Amazon rain for-est but also almost all of the coastal forest area of Brazil must be immediately recovered. If for no other reason, the depletion of the dams that feed much of the São Paulo population should suffice as an argument.

The export of water from the Amazon to other regions of Brazil, especially the Southeast and the South, is a reality and occurs through the phe-nomenon known as flying rivers (see Pesquisa


FLYInG RIVERSThe amazon rain forest sits atop a

huge amount of water, the alter do

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moisture from the groundwater and

the ocean and releases it into the

atmosphere in the form of vapor,

creating air currents that export

rains to distant places

pathways to the tapair, surface and ground sources are added to the supply

In RURAL AnD URBAn AREASThe presence of native forest

is essential to the health

of watersheds. The planting

of intensive crops and forest

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FAPESP Issue No. 158). One indication of this direct connection was the heavy rains in south-western Amazonia in early 2014, which were al-most double the usual volume, while São Paulo experienced a historic drought. “The rain was trapped in Rondônia, Acre and Bolivia because of atmospheric blocking, similar to an air bubble that prevented the passage of moisture. This created an atmospheric stability, inhibited the formation of rain and elevated temperatures,” says Marengo, now a researcher at the National Center for Natu-ral Disaster Monitoring and Alerts (CEMADEN). He is the co-author of a lead article by Jhan Carlo Espinoza, of the Geophysical Institute of Peru, which is slated for publication by Environmental Research Letters and is part of the results of the Green Ocean Amazon (GOAmazon) program that has the support of FAPESP.

However, it is impossible to say how much this relationship affects the São Paulo drought. “Calculating how much of the Southeast’s rain comes from the Amazon and how much of it is brought by cold fronts coming from the South, moisture carried by sea breezes or local evapora-tion is still an inexact science,” he says. Marengo believes that deforestation may have a long-term

impact, but it is still impossible to say whether it is related to the current drought. “The Southeast may not turn into a desert,” he adds, “but weather extremes may become more intense.” Studies us-ing climate models created by the Marengo group already forecast a redistribution of total rainfall, with a very heavy volume over a few days and longer droughts, which is something that has already been observed in Brazil’s Southeast and South in the last 50 years.

In addition to this effect-at-a-distance on a na-tional scale, the relationship between vegetation and water resources also occurs on a more lo-cal scale, according to Walter de Paula Lima, an agronomist and professor at the Luiz de Queiroz School of Agriculture (ESALQ) of the University of São Paulo (USP) and the scientific coordinator of the Cooperative Environmental Monitoring Program on Microbasins (PROMAB) of the In-stitute of Forestry Research and Studies. In his studies on the effect of forests (or their removal) on microbasins, he showed that the riparian for-est bordering watercourses helps to maintain the health of small rivers. “The Cantareira system, which supplies São Paulo, consists of thousands of microbasins,” he says. “Those that are more de-

flying rivers: currents of water vapor that form over the amazon rain forest export rains to southern Brazil

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graded do not contribute to the watershed.” This assessment, however, lacks concrete experimen-tal data. According to Lima, to discover exactly how riparian forests affect watersheds, it would be necessary to study an experimental microba-sin where the properties of watercourses could be measured with and without forest protection, and absent any other factors—a virtually unat-tainable scenario.

A practical experience that reinforces the importance of preserving riparian forests to

maintain water resources has been reported by Ricardo Ri-beiro Rodrigues, an ESALQ bi-ologist and recovery specialist of native forests. He says that 24 years ago, the water disap-peared from the microbasin in Iracemápolis, a city locat-ed in São Paulo State. The city sought help from ESALQ, and Rodrigues’ group implemented a soil conservation project for the microbasin and recovery of the riparian vegetation that should be there. “I was recently there and was very surprised,” he says. The level of the dam is a little lower, but it has enough water to continue supplying Iracemápolis, whose popula-tion has tripled since then. “The whole region is experiencing

water shortage problems but not Iracemápolis.”Forests affect the health of water resources

through their influence on rainfall but are also important in regard to their relationship with groundwater. Edson Wendland, an engineer and professor in the Department of Hydraulics and Sanitation, São Carlos School of Engineering (EESC-USP), is studying precisely what hap-pens to the Guarani aquifer recharge when the Cerrado is replaced with pasture and crops such as sugarcane, citrus or eucalyptus. The work is being conducted in the Ribeirão da Onça Basin, city of Brotas, São Paulo State, which has been studied since the 1980s.

Through monitoring wells and weather sta-tions, the idea is to detail how the Guarani aqui-fer recharges under different land use systems before there is no more of the Cerrado’s origi-nal vegetation left. “It is impossible to manage what we don’t know,” says Wendland about one of Brazil’s most important groundwater sources. The aquifer is a porous layer of rocks infiltrated by rainwater, which is then slowly released into rivers. This time difference between supply and discharge, a result of the slow path of the water through the underground aquifer, is what en-

sures the continuity of rivers, which depend on this water reserve.

Wendland’s group has shown, for example, that water availability decreases when the small twisted trees of the Cerrado, which have adapted to living under water stress, are replaced by eu-calyptus trees, which consume a lot of water and reach cutting size within a few years. Measure-ments made between 2004 and 2007 show that recharge rates are closely related to the intensity of the rainfall and the size of the crop in this re-gion where the Cerrado is virtually extinct, ac-cording to an article accepted for publication in the Annals of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.

However, this does not mean that eucalyptus trees are unconditional villains. The impact of large trees depends, in part, upon the depth of the aquifer at the location where they are plant-ed. According to Lima, trees that PROMAB has continuously monitored for a period of more than 20 years showed that the relationship between forest species and water is not constant. “Where availability is critical, a new element can dry the microbasins,” he says. “However, where water and climate balance is good, the water reduction is not even felt.” These findings make it clear that a zoning plan is needed to indicate where planting would be good and where the practice would be harmful—something that does not exist in Brazil.

T o Wendland, the importance of under-standing the relationship between the Cer-rado and the aquifers is crucial, because

the sources of most of Brazil’s major river basins are in the domain of this biome. In addition to their importance as water resources, some of these basins—Paraná, Tocantins, Parnaíba and São Francisco—are the main providers of water for power generation in Brazil.

In just over half a century, half of the Cerrado area was cleared and given over to agricultural activities. To evaluate the effect of this change in land use on water availability, Paulo Tarso de Oliveira, a doctoral student in the São Carlos group, conducted a study using remote sensing data from the entire area of the Cerrado biome. With the sensors, it is possible to not only evalu-ate the changes in vegetation but also measure the rainfall and the evapotranspiration rates of plants and estimate the variation of water storage. Ac-cording to an article published in the September 2014 issue of Water Resources Research, the data indicate a flow reduction because of more intense agricultural activities.

Deforestation and the agricultural use of soil are important, but Wendland says the biggest problem affecting aquifer recharge today is the reduction in rainfall. “The aquifer can make up for the lack of rainfall for two or three years, but after that it

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Forests affect water resources through their influence on rainfall and groundwater recharge

pESQUISA FApESp | 11

can no longer maintain the base flow in rivers,” he says. In recent years, the rainfall of the rainy season has been below average, according to ob-servational data. It also explains, he says, alarming phenomena, such as the depletion of the headwa-ters of the São Francisco River, which remained dry for about three months and only returned to a flow stage at the end of November.

The challenge of managing groundwater, repre senting 98% of the planet’s fresh water, has other peculiarities in urban areas, where it can be a crucial resource. According to Ricardo Hirata, a geologist with the Geosciences Institute (IGc-USP), 75% of São Paulo’s municipalities are supplied in whole or part by groundwater. This includes major cities of the state, especially Ri-beirão Preto, where 100% of more than 600,000 residents are served. Nationwide, there are other cities completely supplied by groundwater, such as Juazeiro do Norte (Ceará State), Santarém (Pará State), and Uberaba (Minas Gerais State), according to the book Águas subterrâneas urbanas no Brasil [Urban Groundwater in Brazil], slated for publication by IGc and the Research Center for Groundwater (Cepas).

S urprisingly, in the cities, it is the water lost by the public supply that will stop the aqui-fer. “The impermeability of the soil reduces

rain water penetration, but the losses offset and overcome this reduction and on balance there is greater recharge where there are cities, compared to other areas,” says Hirata. “If we analyze the water from a well anywhere in São Paulo, half will be from the aquifer and half from Sabesp (water and sewage management company owned by the state of São Paulo).” He estimates that the state capital has nearly 13,000 private wells, and many of them are illegal. “There is a law to man-age this resource, but it is not followed,” he says.

A problem caused by the cities is groundwa-ter contamination by nitrate due to leaks in the sewer system. As decontamination is expen-sive, the affected wells are abandoned. In cit-ies where the aquifers are used for the public water supply, the solution is to mix the polluted water with water from clean wells so that the overall quality is acceptable. “In Natal (capital of Rio Grande do Norte State) there is insuffi-cient water to mix,” says Hirata. Groundwater is the source of 70% of its supply.

Another significant source of pollution comes from industry, such as the pollution caused by chlorinated solvents. Reginaldo Bertolo, an IGc geologist and director of Cepas, studies how this pollutant behaves in the aquifer below Juru-batuba, in the south São Paulo area, which has been an industrial region since the 1950s. “It is a contaminant with problematic behavior in the

aquifer,” he says. In this hard rock, where the wa-ter flows into fractures, the compound, which is denser than water, goes deeper and only stops when it encounters an impermeable stratum. “Chlorinated solvents are toxic and carcinogenic products.” Pollution prevents the use of ground-water in a region where the demand is strong.

In collaboration with researchers at the Uni-versity of Guelph in Canada, the Bertolo group is mapping these pollutants in order to understand how the chlorinated solvent compound behaves and to propose strategies to eliminate it from the aquifer. To achieve this, the next step is to use a system developed by the Canadian researchers to take rock samples and install special monitor-ing wells. “The equipment allows us to collect water from more than 20 different fractures in the same drilling,” he says. “We’re going to do a mathematical model to reproduce what happens and make some forecasts.”

Bertolo says it is important to better map the groundwater and analyze its quality, because it is a resource that can supplement city water sup-plies. “Groundwater is a little-known resource.”


In late november, the cantareira

system had water in the Paiva castro

reservoir (right), while the drought

was evident at the Jacarei and

Jaguari reservoirs

Monica Porto, an engineer at the USP Polytechnic School (Poli/USP), does not believe it is possible to greatly expand the use of these waters in the São Paulo Metropolitan Region. In her opinion, to go beyond a flow rate of approximately 10 cubic meters per second (m3/s) extracted from thou-sands of existing wells would take thousands of new drillings. “However, we can not do without these 10 m3/s; we need to take care of them.”

Porto, who was a past president and is still a member of the advisory board of the Brazilian Association of Water Resources, is considering ways to ensure a secure water supply for the population. Lack of water is, in fact, among the most serious things that can happen to a city. “We are forced to work with a very low prob-ability of failure.” According to Porto, in 2009 the São Paulo state government commissioned a consulting firm to do a study on what would need to be conducted to guarantee the water sup-ply. The study was completed in October 2013, when the state was already in the midst of the most severe water crisis in its history. Porto says it is impossible to consider Greater São Paulo in isolation because there is nowhere else to draw water from without a dispute with neighbors. Therefore, the study covers the mega-metropolis, which includes more than 130 municipalities and a population of 30 million people.

The development of the public works needed to improve water security has began, with a sys-tem to collect water from the Juquiá River in the Ribeira Valley, which should be completed by 2018. Construction of the Pedreira and Duas Pontes dams, which should supply the Campinas region, is in the environmental licensing phase. “Manaus and Campinas are the only cities in Brazil with more than one million people and no water reservoir,” says Porto. Manaus does not

need a reservoir, as it is situated on the banks of the Amazon River; however, Campinas, which relies on the Cantareira system, does need one. Porto, who “makes a great effort” to save water at home, says the current crisis is important for raising public awareness about the need to reduce consumption. It also highlights the importance of the set of measures that need to be reviewed on an emergency basis. “We have to learn from the pain,” she says, and jokingly adds that it is better if it does not rain enough to drive away the instructive crisis. “However, if it does not rain very soon, I will stop joking: we need rain.” n

Projects1. Understanding the causes of the biases that determine the onset of the rainy season in amazonia in climate models using goamazon--chUva [rain project] measurements (no. 13/50538-7); Principal investigator José antonio marengo orsini (cemaDen); Grant mecha-nism regular Line of research Project award - goamazon; Investment r$57,960.00 (faPesP).2. establishment of the hydrogeological conceptual model and fate and transport of chlorinated organic compounds in the fractured aqui-fer of Jurubatuba region, são Paulo (no. 13/10311-3); Principal investi-gator reginaldo antonio Bertolo (Igc-UsP); Grant mechanism regular Line of research Project award; Investment r$502,715.27 (faPesP).

scientific articlesmaKarIeva, a.m. et al. Why does air passage over forest yield more rain? examining the coupling between rainfall, pressure and atmos-pheric moisture content. Journal of hydrometeorology. v. 15, no. 1, p. 411-26. february 2014.maKarIeva, a.m. et al. Where do winds come from? a new theory on how water vapor condensation influences atmospheric pressure and dynamics. Atmospheric Chemistry and physics. v. 13, p. 1039-56. January 25, 2013.esPInoZa, J. et al. The extreme 2014 flood in south-western amazon basin: The role of tropical-subtropical south atlantic ssT gradient. Environmental Research Letters. In press.WenDLanD, e. et al. recharge contribution to the guarani aquifer system estimated from the water balance method in a represen-tative watershed. Annals of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. In press.oLIveIra, P.T.s. et al. Trends in water balance components across the Brazilian cerrado. Water Resources Research. v. 50, no. 9, p. 7100-14. september 2014.

> see videos on our website: revistapesquisa.fapesp.br

pESQUISA FApESp | 13


The man who calculates

InTervIew

Marcos Pivetta

artur Ávila, a Rio de Janeiro-based specialist in a field called dynamical systems in which the objective is to develop a theory capable of predicting the long-term evolution of natural and human phenomena,

received the Fields Medal, the most important international mathematics award, on August 13, 2014. At 35, he became the first Brazilian and South American to be granted such an honor, which is given every four years by the International Mathematics Union (IMU) to researchers under 40. In addi-tion to Ávila, who works at the National Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics (IMPA) in Rio de Janeiro and is head of research at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris, the medal was also awarded to the Austrian Marnin Hairer, the Canadian Manjul Bhargava, and the Ira-nian Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman to win the award. Of the four winners, who also received €10,000 in cash, Ávila was the youngest. “For the other candidates, this was the last chance to win the medal because of the age limit. Due to circumstances at the time, I thought I had little chance of being recognized this year,” Ávila said in an interview in Rio de Janeiro, after traveling to Seoul to receive the award at the 27th International Congress of Mathematicians.

The excellence of this Brazilian, who also gained French citizenship last year, manifested itself early. The only child of divorced parents (he has a half-sister through his father), he had a middle-class upbringing and attended good schools. In 1995, at the age of 16, Ávila won the gold medal at the In-ternational Mathematical Olympiad. Two years later, while

Artur Ávila

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SPeCIALTY Dynamic systems

eDUCATIOn Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and National Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics (IMPA)

InSTITUTIOn IMPA and National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Paris

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still a student at the traditional Santo Agostinho High School and without hav-ing enrolled in a university, he completed a Master’s degree at IMPA. In 2001, at the age of 21, he finished his Doctorate, also at IMPA, along with an undergraduate degree at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). “Smart students usu-ally like to show off and ask many ques-tions,” says researcher Welington Celso de Melo, Ávila’s PhD advisor. “Arthur was different. He did not talk much, but when he asked questions I was unable to answer them immediately. I would have to go home and think about the answer.”

Married to a researcher in econom-ics, with no children, Ávila lives in both Paris and Rio de Janeiro, the two cit-ies that let him do what he likes best: solve big mathematical problems. Among his achievements are solutions for the Schrödinger operators, mathematical tools that help describe the evolution of vector states in quantum systems. Even before winning the Fields Medal, Ávila, who has over 50 published papers, en-joyed enormous prestige in mathematical circles. His way of conducting research is unusual. He does not read much, he does not teach, and he can work at home, in his office, or even on the beach if he is in Rio. He prefers to learn a new research topic by establishing partnerships with colleagues who are specialists in the field in question. “You are talking, and the person explains what is most important. You do not necessarily need to read all of the literature on a problem,” he said. Averse to interviews, Ávila says he has no vocation for communicating mathemat-ics to the general public, a duty that will be difficult to avoid after receiving the greatest international award ever granted to a Brazilian researcher.

It is true that, unlike the Nobel Prize, the Fields Medal winners are notified in advance that they were chosen to re-ceive the award? We knew before the announcement. I knew five months in advance and had to keep it secret. It was a long time, but I contained myself.

Your name was already under consid-eration to receive the medal four years ago. Did you expect to win the award this time? I didn’t expect to win this time due to

the existence of another strong candi-date in a similar subarea and the fact that I was younger than the other candidates. I still had one more chance and could win the medal in 2018. For the others, this was the last chance to win because of the age limit. Due to circumstances at the time, I thought I had little chance of being recognized this year.

Who was the other candidate in your subarea? The Iranian Maryam Mirzakhani, who also won the award, was the other candi-date. It was exceptional that they gave the medal to both of us. We work in neigh-boring subareas, and that made it unlikely that both of us would be honored in the same year. For this reason, and because it was the last chance for her but not for me, I thought that I would not win.

Have you and Maryam worked to-gether?No. However, I have worked with peo-ple who have worked with her. She has already used results from my work and vice-versa. She works in a subarea that intersects with mine, and we have com-mon interests. So, we could work togeth-er in this subarea, and we are certainly working in the same direction with com-mon co-authors. For some reason, we have never even met.

Normally, do the organizers of the award avoid giving the medal to mathemati-cians in similar subareas? There are no rules. However, I under-stand that if there is a situation in which one candidate could wait four years un-til the next award, they might prefer to award the medal to people from a greater variety of subareas. It was what I would think and what could have happened to me. I could certainly have been a can-didate in 2018, too. I was not in a hurry.

In 2018, the International Congress of Mathematicians will be in Rio de Ja-neiro. Do you think the choice of Bra-zil to host the meeting influenced your candidacy for the medal? The decision on where to hold the con-gress is separate from the award commit-tee decision. They are quite different is-sues. The meeting involves mathematical development questions and organization issues. The fact that Brazil has demon-

strated its ability to organize major events helped its candidacy. Many countries that have hosted the event have never won a medal, such as South Korea, In-dia and Spain. The medal is for recogni-tion of mathematical research, a purely scientific issue. It is the first time a prize winner has completed all of his education through the doctoral level in a develop-ing country, rather than in Japan, parts of Europe, the United States or Israel. I studied only in Brazil, and this did not hold me back. The quality of the PhD I did at IMPA was the same as whatever I could have done abroad. It is a clear demonstration of the quality of what can be done here in Brazil. This, of course, is due to the teaching and research IMPA has been carrying out for decades.

How did you see yourself at 21, finishing your PhD? Did you feel you were special because you were a prodigy? I was younger than most PhD students. However, I knew that I could finish my PhD early but still not become a great researcher. You can be an excellent math student and have excellent grades but not have the ability to do research. Even if, in this context, you are able to do PhD research, you could have difficulty con-tinuing in a research-oriented career. Sometimes, you cannot continue to pro-duce the same quality of work. You could also not demonstrate any exceptional abilities at the start of your career, and then at some point things could click. That is how I saw things, and my goals were very basic. During my PhD, my goal was to perform research to obtain basic results. I intended to follow the normal path of a researcher when he wants a career, without lofty future goals. I had reasonable ambitions because I knew that obstacles could arise and probably would.

You started studying at IMPA very ear-ly. How did that happen? That was because IMPA sometimes ac-cepts younger students who are still in high school. They do this if they perceive that the student is able to do the work. I knew about this, and this aroused my in-terest in doing the same thing. This wish was granted when I returned from the 1995 International Mathematical Olym-piad, at which I won the gold medal. IMPA suggested that I take one of the level 1 courses shortly before starting


the Master’s degree. If everything went well, I would enroll. In fact, that is what I did while still in the last year of high school. I started at the Master’s level, and after a while I continued on to the Doctorate more or less normally, taking courses at IMPA. At one point, I began to talk with researchers, with Welington, and that was how I got my start in the field of dynamical systems.

Why did you become interested in math-ematics and not science? I don’t know. I always liked math, even before I understood the difference be-tween the fields, since I was 5, for no spe-cial reason. I also liked other fields that I thought were science. But, in mathe-matics, you can advance much faster on your own and I had this contact with the mathematics Olympiads, which gave me encouragement and focus and also served to transition me to IMPA.

How did you become interested in dy-namical systems?I have certain characteristics as a re-searcher that adapt well to research in dynamical systems and that would also adapt to other areas. I am an analyst. I work with analyses, statistics, and geom-etry. In my case, I was more exposed to the area of dynamical systems because I was at IMPA and in direct contact with Welington. That is why I chose dynami-cal systems, where these characteristics are very important. You can treat this topic using these techniques or others. I like the area, but the choice of dynamical

systems was due to the historical chance of my being at IMPA.

How would you explain the area of dy-namical systems to a layperson?In general, dynamical systems is the study of systems that change over time, with a rule that describes the transition from one moment in time to the next; between today and tomorrow, for example. This rule could be very simple. But, over a long period of time, you see complicated be-havior emerging. We call some systems chaotic. The study of this chaotic behav-ior that emerges in the long term is one of the principal concerns in the area of dy-namical processes. [The results and meth-ods originating from the area of dynami-cal systems are used to explain complex phenomena in fields such as chemistry (reactions, industrial processes), physics (turbulence, phase transitions, optics), biology (species competition, neurobi-ology) and economics (growth models, financial market behavior).] Superficially, people associate chaos with disorganization, but there are rules within the chaos, right?We have become able to better describe good-quality chaotic systems, which have certain characteristics. They are sensi-tive to initial conditions, and in them, small changes create large effects. At first glance, on the one hand, it seems to be something that prevents us from saying anything useful about the system that de-stroys the possibility of forecasts. But, on the other hand, it introduces new rules

that the system follows, new laws that can be used by the system. These laws are no longer deterministic but rather statis-tical and probabilistic. We then have to ask questions and try to give answers in terms of probabilities and system behav-iors instead of having absolute certainty. We try to model the system stochastically [using a probabilistic description of the processes]. We try to treat the system in whatever way possible.

It is correct to think of the Sun and its planets as an example of a chaotic dy-namical system? In the planetary system, it is difficult to describe the emergence of chaos. This is still very complex and is not very well understood. However, an event in which chaotic phenomena appear could be due to the interaction of quadratic functions [second-order polynomials], which every child learns about in school. After a long time, what would be the effect of the re-peated application of the same quadratic law? It could result in the emergence of chaos. This is a very simple example of what happens.

Some people say that you’re a great problem solver, perhaps more so than a formulator of theories. Do you agree with this statement?Many times in my career I have sought out known difficult problems and worked hard to solve them. Because I did this sev-eral times, it is certainly true that I solved many problems. But, to a lesser extent, I also worked on building and developing these theories, which sometimes involve not only solving but also formulating the problem. In the beginning, I resolved a problem related to Schrödinger operators, but later, I also constructed a theory and solved problems related to it. However, certainly, the most visible aspect of my work is my many solutions of dynamical systems problems in different contexts.

Your PhD advisor, Professor de Melo, said that you have always been very se-lective in your choice of projects and became interested in the great problems of mathematics, trying to avoid being sidetracked by smaller questions. Was that your strategy?I work on things I like, with problems that particularly interest me, that I con-sider beautiful. Often, the problems

Fields Medal awards ceremony during the International Congress of Mathematicians in Seoul

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considered difficult are fundamental because some aspect of them is of great interest. Theories also develop around these problems. The mathematician is usually attracted by the richness of the theory around these objects. Working with these problems allows us to explore more pleasurable things. However, I do not discard a problem because others think it is not important. I also worked on questions that I knew would not have a monumental impact. I solve these sim-pler problems faster. I do not spend most of my time working on them because they can be solved quickly. They are simpler.

You did various projects with colleagues. Do you like to work as part of a team? I mainly like it when I want to learn something. I do not tend to read.

What do you mean? I read very few mathematics books and papers.

How can you do research like that?In mathematics, you can advance without having a deep knowledge of the literature; it is more important to have a very pre-cise understanding of the fundamentals. I learn these important things more eas-ily by talking to other researchers. That is when collaboration is useful. You are talk-ing, and the person explains what is most important. You do not necessarily need to read all of the literature on a problem.

Is this unique to you or do many math-ematicians work this way?It is not a completely unique character-istic. Mathematicians work in differ-ent ways. Some mathematicians like to read a lot. I do not. I know a lot because I have already solved many problems. I often begin to work in an area, doing research, even before studying the area. Before studying, I try to solve a prob-lem. However, it is very difficult to start from nothing, without knowing anything. So, I begin a collaboration, and before I even learn a topic in depth, I have already solved an important problem; that moti-vates me more. I have changed subareas several times, and each time, I solved an important problem right away and only later understood what the theory said about that problem. It involves a bit of the technical characteristic of the person and their intuition, too. For me, it works.

How does intuition help the mathema-tician?The most difficult parts of mathematical work are those that involve creativity, which lead to discovering things that are, obviously, different from the basic rules. Every top mathematician has excellent technical skills and can follow known paths without difficulty. This is certainly true in my case. What trips up research is having to go outside established methods, discover something and try to identify a way to attack the problem. Faced with the unknown, there is no rule as to how to approach something. You must rely on your intuition to decide how to attack a problem. This involves a bit of experi-ence, which helps a lot in developing in-tuition on a topic. You go in one direction because you hope it will work, but you cannot formalize it mathematically yet.

Why did you become a French citizen?I completed my PhD in Brazil and went to France in 2001. My first positions were in France, and I spent five years there before returning to Brazil. After that, I spent three years in Brazil, and then started spending half of my time here and half there. The time I spent in France complemented my training as a mathematician, and I extended my ar-eas of research. I finished my PhD with the ability to conduct research at a high level. My results were recognized as im-portant, but I had a restricted view of the area and its position within the whole of mathematics. In Paris, I had contact with the largest community of math-ematicians in the world and unparal-leled activity. This forced me beyond my area of expertise at the time, one-dimensional dynamics, and made me look for other things to be able to in-teract with these people who were not necessarily interested in the same things that I was. In this search with such good professionals, with so many possible co-authors, I started working in other areas, and my work was lauded due to what I did in these areas. The mathematician that I am today is a result of my time in France and my training in Brazil. Thus, I thought it was more accurate to con-sider myself a French-Brazilian math-ematician. If I am a French-Brazilian mathematician, it makes sense to have French nationality too, which also leads to practical benefits for my life there.

What is your work schedule like, in Rio and Paris?I go back and forth. I do not spend six whole months here or there, it is much more broken up. I spend some months there, others here. I try to avoid winter in Paris, but there are some exceptions. The details of the trips are decided at the last minute and, depending on the cir-cumstances, I choose the specific dates. I have a great deal of flexibility because I only research and do not teach. It is one of my characteristics. I prefer to spend my time on research, and I do not think I have great teaching skills. I have PhD students, but basically, I do not teach. So, I do not have to follow a calendar, which I would have to do if I had to teach. It is true that you wake up late and usu-ally work more at night?I certainly continue waking up late, at 11:00 or even at 13:00. However, this var-ies a lot. It depends on the previous day and on things that could be more en-grossing. At night, I work before going to bed or, if I wake in the middle of the night, I can think about mathematics. However, I try to work in the afternoons too. I often work with colleagues and I am not going to work with them after midnight. I have worked in various sit-uations. Most recently on the beach or walking along the beach, for example. Not so much at night.

Are your routines in Paris and Rio similar?Not at all. To begin with, I do not have a set routine. There, I tend to go to my office more often. There is no beach there, of course. So I meet co-authors, colleagues and students. I try to have several meetings during the day, not nec-essarily in my office. Some days I stay at home, too. In France, this occurs more frequently. In Brazil, I usually invite peo-ple to meet me near my home. When I work alone, I tend to stay at home or go to the beach. I am not always working intensely. When I am not working on a very specific line of research or when I am a bit lost, unsure of how to approach a problem—which happens most of the time—working intensely doesn’t help much, and there is no way I can work for many hours at a time. I don’t work many hours a week then. It is different from some situations, which occur now


and then, in which I hope, know or imag-ine that something is going to work and involve a lot of technical but directed work. In these cases, I work very in-tensely, for many hours a day.

Brazil’s math and science teaching is poor. Do you consider yourself an ex-ception, given this?I think that I am more a natural conse-quence of the evolution of science, espe-cially mathematics, which is perhaps the most developed field in Brazil in terms of international impact. This is due to the inherent properties of mathematics but also to the people who work in the field. Mathematics depends more on human resources than on material resources. Having focused people can be enough to go far. When one depends on many material resources, such as laboratories, the will of the researchers will not be enough, no matter how competent they are. [Brazil’s prestige is evidenced by the fact that there are currently four Brazilian voting repre-sentatives at the IMU gen-eral assembly, one less than powers like the United States and France. At the Interna-tional Conference in Seoul, four mathematicians from IMPA gave talks.]

What could be done in the schools to awaken interest in mathematics?Given my background, I did not have contact with teach-ing in schools. I went to very select schools, I went directly to IMPA and did not spend much time at a university. I formally attended a university, but I studied at IMPA. I did not have contact with the reality of teaching in Brazil. If I talk about education, it is more about what I imagine it is like. I do not teach at a university, so I do not have daily contact with that reality. I prefer to let other people who have more contact with and ideas on this topic discuss it. There are high-level mathematicians who have much better ideas about this that I do.

Another Brazilian at IMPA, Fernando Codás, has been mentioned in relation

to winning the medal. What do you think of this possibility?I think that Brazil and IMPA have been producing excellent mathematicians for some time. I am a bit reluctant to put pressure on any one person. It is not supernatural to win an award. What was considered impossible occurred. It oc-curred within a continuum of improve-ment in Brazilian mathematics. It is not a unique event that cannot be repeat-ed. However, it really is a rare award. Not receiving it does not mean your re-search is of poor quality. I like to remind people that Germany—which has 100 Nobel prizes to Brazil’s none—has only one Fields Medal winner. You can see how rare this award is. This does not diminish the quality of the research car-

ried out by German mathematicians and their contributions in any way. You can-not measure things by these awards; it would create immense distortions. The analysis is much more complicated. With the medal, it is easy to show people that Brazil did something at the highest in-ternational level. Before, Brazil already did so, but it was harder to demonstrate it. People could even say “so, where is the award?” However, now they can’t. However, things should not be measured in that way because that is not the focus.

Do you think that, from now on, you will be a sort of ambassador for Brazil-ian science and mathematics abroad? Among mathematicians, IMPA was al-

ready well-known. So, it is not so impor-tant that I play this role. I think that to a slight extent, I have the role of helping promote mathematics to people who are not mathematicians and who do not know that we do high-level mathemat-ics in Brazil.

Do you intend to give talks in schools?I will probably do something along those lines, but the objective is to play this role alongside people who have more of a calling for it. I am very limited in vari-ous aspects related to explaining math to a more general public. It is not one of my skills. I already find it difficult to talk to non-PhD students in mathematics, even in my subarea. On the other hand, I have greater visibility. We still have not

decided how we are going to reconcile this. However, in practice, due to my limita-tions, I will not be commu-nicating directly with people.

But wouldn’t it be natural for people to expect you to have greater contact with non-specialists?They can ask, but I have a choice. I think I can do some-thing positive indirectly. There are many competent people who communicate much better than I do. I do not need to be the person speaking. I can be next to him or her.

What is your life like outside of mathematics?

In Brazil, I try to go to the gym often and, when possible, to the beach. I live on Leblon beach. I like to walk in the neighborhood and do typical things, like going to juice cafés. In Rio, I have childhood friends with whom I main-tain contact, and I organize get-togeth-ers. Everything I do is very normal. I don’t do anything very odd, no high-risk sports, no trips unrelated to math-ematics. In Paris, I meet with a group of math colleagues after work and we go to bars and such. Paris is famous for its cultural life, its museums. Do you go to these places often?No. n

The Fields Medal is a clear demonstration of the quality of the research that can be conducted in Brazil

20 z special issue November 2015

A report shows that biofuel

expansion requires the support of public

policies to be sustained at a global level

The challenge of scaling up

T he current state of scientific and technological development already allows for large-scale, worldwide bioenergy produc-

tion. However, public policies that en-compass the entire renewable energy production chain must be adopted for this goal to become a reality; these poli-cies include land use and the efficiency of technologies for converting biomass into power, in addition to environmental, economic and social challenges. This finding is one of the primary conclu-sions of a report on the implementation of bioenergy systems worldwide, about which some aspects were presented during the opening of the second edi-tion of the Brazilian BioEnergy Science and Technology Conference (BBEST) held October 20-24, 2014 in Campos do Jordão (São Paulo State). The report, entitled, “Quick Evaluation Process on Biofuels and Sustainability,” was pre-pared by researchers who participated in FAPESP’s special programs, specifi-cally the Program for Research on Bio-energy (BIOEN), the Research Program in Identification, Conservation, Recovery

and Sustainable Use of Biodiversity in the State of São Paulo (Biota) and The FAPESP Research Program on Global Climate Change (RPGCC).

“Global public policies are beginning to reflect that we need to triple our pro-duction of modern bioenergy by 2030,” says Glaucia Mendes Souza, a researcher at the Chemistry Institute of the Univer-sity of São Paulo (USP) and the coordina-tor of BIOEN. She was responsible for or-ganizing the report, which was compiled in collaboration with scientists from 24 countries under the auspices of the Sci-entific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE), a partner of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The final document was released on April 14-15, 2015 during a FAPESP semi-nar, and it also included the launch of a summary to guide public policy.

The report highlights the role of bio-energy in food security. According to the document, modern bioenergy may have the ability to increase land productivity by integrating the production of maize and sugarcane, for example, to produce e

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ethanol or soy and palm oil for biodiesel, with agriculture connected to the food supply. “Bioenergy production in the poorest rural areas can also boost the local economy by creating jobs and mar-kets,” says Souza.

However, the report does note that we must have a better understanding of the impact of the land-use measures that are adopted for bioenergy produc-tion. The same type of biomass, such as sugarcane, may be used for different purposes, namely liquid fuel for heating or electricity generation, and it would then have different impacts. Monitoring these impacts is essential. “If planting sugarcane deposits tons of nitrogen into the soil, this can increase greenhouse gas emissions such as nitrous oxide. We have to be very careful with the technologies we use,” says Reynaldo Victoria, a USP researcher and a coordinating member of the RPGCC.

A BIOEN study shows that direct greenhouse gas emissions from sugar-cane cultivation in Brazil are lower than those estimated in the international sci-entific literature. “The conditions under

Published in november 2014

Policy bioenerGY y

PESQUiSA FAPESP z21

sugarcane: bioenergy power plant efficiency in brazil is internationally recognized; the next step is to leverage new technologies to increase ethanol production


which we produce sugarcane here do not lead to large emissions of nitrous oxide,” says Heitor Cantarella, a researcher at the Campinas Agronomy Institute (IAC) and the study coordinator. However, the ideal is for sugarcane growers to adopt solutions to reduce or mitigate gas emis-sions, he says. Some strategies are be-ginning to be evaluated by Cantarella’s research group in São Paulo. One such strategy is to avoid applying fertilizer and vinasse (vinasse is a byproduct of the industrial processing of alcohol) at the same time because the combination of these items leads to the production of nitrous oxide in the soil. “The cur-rent planting practice is to apply them simultaneously to speed up the process. We need to change that mindset,” says Cantarella. “The sugarcane remains sus-tainable. Our goal now is to improve its indicators in relation to greenhouse gas emissions,” he says.

ETHANol VERSATiliTyBioenergy production from biomass can also contribute to the recovery and in-crease of environmental resources for the fauna of degraded soils. “In some circumstances, when degraded pastures are replaced with sugarcane or euca-lyptus, this results in soil recovery and even an increase of resources for fauna in this area,” says Luciano Verdade, a USP professor and coordinating member of

the Biota-FAPESP Program, who also helped to prepare the report.

The experts at BBEST presented spe-cific cases throughout the week to illus-trate the potential of biomass utilization. One such case is the use of sugarcane ethanol to obtain hydrogen, which may be used in cars powered by fuel cells. This project is underway at the Hy-drogen Laboratory at the University of Campinas (Unicamp), which seeks to develop small hydrogen extraction sta-tions in partnership with the Hytron company by using the ethanol sold at gas stations. “The idea is to show that etha-nol is versatile and the form in which it is sold today at gas stations could be used more efficiently,” says Carla Cavaliero, a professor at Unicamp and a laboratory researcher.

Some manufacturers, such as Honda, Toyota and Hyundai, recently launched models powered by fuel cells. However,

“Bioenergy production in the poorest rural areas can boost the local economy,” says Glaucia Mendes Souza

the cost of producing these cars is still high. In Europe and the United States, hydrogen extraction is performed direct-ly at some gas stations, not from ethanol but through the electrolysis (decompo-sition) of water. “The advantage of us-ing ethanol to obtain hydrogen is that Brazil already has a competitive advan-tage in producing fuel from sugarcane, which makes the process cheaper,” says Cavaliero.

The possibilities of producing ad-vanced liquid biofuels were also dis-cussed at BBEST. The participants had the opportunity to learn about advances in the production of cellulosic ethanol that was made in Brazil from agricul-tural waste such as sugarcane bagasse. In 2014, two companies began the com-mercial production of second-generation ethanol, which is another name for cel-lulosic ethanol. One is GranBio, which opened a production plant in Alagoas

experts from around the world gathered in campos do Jordão (são Paulo state) for the second edition of bbesT. The challenge of articulating policies for the bioenergy sector was on the agenda

1

PESQUiSA FAPESP z23

State. Approximately US$190 million was invested by GranBio in addition to ano ther R$300 million from the Brazil-ian Development Bank (BNDES). The factory has the capacity to produce 82 million liters of anhydrous ethanol per year and will be fully operational by 2015. Another initiative is the Sugarcane Tech-nology Center (CTC), which was created in 1969 by Copersucar and began opera-ting a demonstration plant for second-generation ethanol, which is located in São Manoel, São Paulo State. The plant is capable of processing 100 tons of sugar-cane biomass per day. The aim of the unit is to showcase the potential of the technology that has been developed by the center, which can multiply the pro-duction of ethanol without expanding the area planted with sugarcane.

In 2008, the process that was deve-loped by CTC to obtain cellulosic etha-nol from sugarcane was patented; it re-presents a strategic difference in com-parison with the methods adopted by other companies that were competing in the race to develop second-genera-tion ethanol in Brazil. The enzymatic hydrolysis process of the cellulose pres-ent in bagasse and straw will be fully in-tegrated into the existing structure of the production plant (see Pesquisa FAPESP Issue No 208).

ENZyMES However, there are still barriers that prevent the production of second-gen-eration ethanol from advancing to an in-dustrial scale. “The most difficult prob-lem is related to enzymes,” says Jaime Finguerut, a technical advisor to CTC’s president. The production of second-generation ethanol depends on the en-zymes used to break down the lignin and hemicellulose of the sugarcane cells to obtain cellulose and then glucose, thus enabling the fermentation of the sugar to obtain ethanol. “There are few sup-pliers of these enzymes and their cost is very high, which makes producing cellulosic ethanol very expensive,” says Finguerut. In partnership with Embrapa and the Brazilian Bioethanol Science and Technology Laboratory (CTBE), the CTC is currently seeking new sup-plies for this process.

The BBEST program schedule was not limited to a discussion of biofuels, such as ethanol. The future of renewable

energy such as wind and solar was also featured during one of the days of the event. The idea was to show that there are other forms of electricity generation that complement the production of bio-energy made from biomass. “Photovol-taic films, for example, are flexible and can be used in the construction of houses and buildings or change the configura-tion of windows, decreasing or increas-ing the incidence of light,” says Helena Li Chum, a Brazilian who has lived in the United States for 30 years and is a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory of the U.S. Depart-ment of Energy. According to Chum, the process of differentiating the capture and distribution of energy is a way to meet the specific demands of different industry sectors.

An example of renewable energy interactions was presented by Danny Krautz of the Berlin Partner for Business and Technology, a German agency that supports innovation. He demonstrated the advantages of crystalline photovol-taic cells, a technology that is used in the manufacture of very thin polymer films capable of converting sunlight into electricity more efficiently than silicon solar panels. “Crystalline photovoltaic cells are already used in Asia, particu-

larly in rural areas. They are light and easy to install,” says Krautz.

Just like photovoltaic film, wind mini-mills have also emerged as alternatives for generating electricity in a decentralized way. These mini-mills are made of small propellers that are five meters in height; they weigh approximately 800 kilos and can be installed in homes, factories or small communities. Jon Samseth of the Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences in Norway says that the idea of these projects, many of which are still under development, is to present an alternative to the centralized pow-er distribution model that exists today. “Producing electricity in a decentralized manner is meant to meet specific needs, which avoids waste and high costs,” he says. One example cited by Samseth is the NuScale SMR, a small nuclear reac-tor developed by the American company NuScale Power. This equipment will not be commercially available until 2020; it can be transported by truck or train and aims to meet the immediate needs of cus-tomers, such as industries and hospitals. Capable of generating 540 megawatts of power for 60 years, this mini-reactor can be built quickly, and if there is an acci-dent, the environmental and economic damages are more easily controlled. nP

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wind turbines in Parnaíba, Piauí state: the future of renewable energy was discussed at the conference

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Scientific paper describes

methodology used to evaluate

the Biota-FAPESP Program

SciEntomEtricS y

Innovative calculations

apaper published by Brazilian researchers in the journal Sci-entometrics demonstrates how a certain method can be used to

evaluate the impact of research programs, especially when the number of projects to be analyzed is limited and the control group – the reference group used as a basis for comparison – has characteristics that differ from those of the group targeted by the study. The paper, which was authored by Fernando Colugnati of the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (UFJF), Ser-gio Firpo of the Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV), and Paula Drummond and Sergio Salles-Filho of the University of Campinas (Unicamp), provides a detailed descrip-tion of this innovative method that was designed to evaluate the Biota-FAPESP Program, which has been studying the biodiversity of São Paulo State since 1999. To gather data about the program's im-pact, the group compared Biota-FAPESP projects with others that have equivalent characteristics but are not part of the pro-gram. Contradicting certain biases from confounding the results was a major chal-lenge. The higher number of projects in the control group – not to mention their characteristics, which differed somewhat from the target group – was just one of

these biases. Whereas the Biota-FAPESP Program sponsors a significant number of thematic projects, which receive large amounts of funding and human resources and can last for up to five years, many proj-ects in the control group were standard research projects, whose duration and resources are more modest.

Thus, the researchers designed a meth-od that could statistically dissociate the effects of Biota's thematic projects. To estimate the probability that each project in the control group could be compared with a Biota Program project, they em-ployed a statistical theory designed in the 1980s. A group of variables that could be potential sources of bias in the study was defined. These variables – including the age of the principal investigator, the num-ber of papers published and the size of the research team – could increase a proj-ect's probability of belonging to the Biota group. This probability, which is called the propensity score (PS), was calculat-ed for each project in the control group. The inverse of the PS provides a type of weighting factor that can be used to cor-rect distortions. As additional challenges, the researchers needed to compensate for the two groups' differences in terms of size and composition and the small size

Fabrício MarquesPuBliShEd in octoBEr 2014

pESQUISA FApESp z 25

This evaluation of the Biota-FAPESP Program was supported by a grant from FAPESP and was conducted by the Study Group for Organization of Research and Innovation (GEOPI), which is affilia-ted with the Department of Science and Technology Policy (DPCT) of the Insti-tute of Geosciences at Unicamp. The group is coordinated by Professor Sergio Salles-Filho, member of FAPESP's Spe-cial Programs Panel, including fellow-ships, Young Investigator and Multi-user Equipment Program (EMU) grants, and the Innovative Research in Small Busi-nesses Program (PIPE), among others. Salles-Filho, who is a supervising mem-ber of the FAPESP Area Panel of Spe-cial Programs, for program evaluations, says that the particular characteristics of each program mean that they can only be evaluated after a specific method has been designed. “And this is sometimes not necessary, but we take the opportuni-ty to test new hypotheses and methods,”

he says. “The biggest challenge, when evaluating the impact of a program, is guaranteeing the attribution of causal-ity; in other words, making sure that the measurements obtained will be effec-tively attributed to the investment made by the program, attempting to isolate other factors that may influence a pro-gram's impact. Whenever possible, we recommend using a control group, but the control group must be reliable, which explains the usefulness of the methodol-ogy based on propensity scores,” he ex-plains. The method has very well-defined applications. “Our group worked on an evaluation of companies that used incen-tives from Brazil's legislation on infor-mation technology, but no control group was possible because the vast majority of Brazilian companies use these incen-tives, and so there was no way to build a reliable control group,” he says.

According to Salles-Filho, designing new methods gives evaluation processes the opportunity to generate knowledge. The scientific contribution generated by the Biota-FAPESP evaluation will not be limited to the paper in Sciento-metrics. The research group at GEOPI expects to complete another study that will compare two distinct methods us-ing the results from the Biota evalua-tion. One is the method that relies on a control group, as described in the article. The other method, which known as ad-ditionality with verification of causal-ity, aims to measure a project’s impact without using a control group by com-paring data from the start and end of a project. “Our goal is to see whether the two methodologies produce equivalent results, or if differences will emerge,” says Salles-Filho. n

of the sample universe from which the projects were selected. “Once the PS had been estimated, the thematic projects in the control group were assigned a higher weight because they were relatively rare. By doing this, we were able to achieve a more uniform and balanced distribution, permitting a less biased comparison be-tween the groups, using statistical mod-els,” says Colugnati.

To select projects for the control group, the researchers accessed approximate-ly 1,400 biological sciences projects in FAPESP's database that were not included in the Biota-FAPESP Program. A search based on keywords (such as “biodiversity” or “biomes”) reduced the sample to ap-proximately 300 projects, and a case-by-case analysis led to a final sample of 117 projects within this group, including the-matic, regular research, and young inves-tigator projects. Adding the 66 projects in the Biota group, the total sample universe consisted of 183 projects. The respective principal investigators were encouraged to complete an online questionnaire to support the assessment. A total of 142 researchers responded, representing 56 Biota-FAPESP Program projects and 86 control group projects. Propensity scor-ing and statistical modeling were then applied to these data.

proSpEctIngThe final judgment was positive for Bio-ta-FAPESP, both in terms of its scientific productivity and ability to support new public policies, although the program still produces modest results in regard to prospecting for compounds that could potentially be used in the pharmaceuti-cal, cosmetic, and other industries (see Pesquisa FAPESP Issue No. 210).Il

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Designing new methods gives evaluation processes the opportunity to generate new knowledge


Researchers discuss partnerships in search

of drugs to treat diseases that are

of little interest to pharmaceutical companies

COLLABORATION y

Bringing intoevidence

Researchers from several coun-tries met on November 13-14, 2014 at FAPESP headquarters to discuss potential cooperation

in the development and delivery of new treatments for so-called neglected dis-eases, those that attract little interest from pharmaceutical companies be-cause they affect mainly poor popula-tions and countries. The list includes Chagas disease, visceral leishmaniasis, malaria and human African trypanoso-miasis (sleeping sickness). The meeting was organized in conjunction with the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) of the United Kingdom and international organizations such as the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDi) and the Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV); it demonstrated that Brazil has much to offer, particularly in the areas of organic chemistry and molecular biology, in finding new drugs, even though ar-ticulation between research groups and

incentives for international collaboration in this area are rare in Brazil. “The event helped us understand how Brazil could be included in large studies of neglected diseases. We are interested in strength-ening this relationship, because Brazil has a strong foundation in chemistry, and many diseases discussed at the meeting are endemic here,” says Alejandra Pal-ermo, RSC’s open innovation manager.

According to data from the World Health Organization (WHO), neglected diseases affect about one billion people worldwide. Of the 17 diseases of this type listed by WHO, 14 are present in Brazil. Last year, RSC signed an agreement with two international organizations that are based in Switzerland, with the aim of developing new drugs. The Society has offered access to a network of collabo-ration in the field of organic chemistry and software to facilitate the exchange of information. According to Palermo, much work done by Brazilian research-

ers could continue to be conducted in consultation and in partnership with the two international organizations whose mission is to develop drugs that are af-fordable by poor populations.

An initiative underway involves the Synthetic Organic Chemistry Labo-ratory of the University of Campinas (Unicamp), with which the DNDi main-tains an unprecedented program in Lat-in America entitled Lead Optimization Latin America (Lola). “The goal is to improve and conduct in vivo testing of chemical compounds to fight Chagas and Leishmaniasis,” says Luiz Carlos Dias, the laboratory coordinator at Uni-camp. He says that working in a network, promoted by the international organi-zation, enables the same molecule to be tested under different scenarios in various countries, thus accelerating the production process of a drug. In the last decade, the Society has been able to pro-vide two new treatments for malaria, one e

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Children playing in a stream in Rondônia in the late afternoon, which is the optimum time for malaria-causing mosquitoes to bite

for sleeping sickness, and one for visceral leishmaniasis as well as a combination of drugs against visceral leishmaniasis specific to Asia and a pediatric treatment with a dose adapted for Chagas disease.

The task of analyzing and preparing a new Chagas compound has been divided among the Unicamp laboratory; the Uni-versity of São Paulo’s Center for Struc-tural Molecular Biotechnology, coordi-nated by Professor Adriano Adricopulo; and the Physics Institute at São Carlos (São Paulo State). The project involves pharmaceutical companies, including AbbVie and Pfizer, and international research institutes including the Swiss Tropical Institute, in Switzerland, and the Drug Discovery Unit of the Univer-sity of Dundee, in Australia.

In another pioneering initiative in Lat-in America, the Dias team is cooperating on MMV projects in Brazil Heterocycles, which is a program that has synthesized two promising molecules for the treat-ment of malaria. This project has col-laborations with international centers, including the Imperial College London, Monash University of Australia, Glaxo Smith Kline in Spain, and Astra Zeneca and Syngene in India.

OBSTACLES“The most expensive stages in the devel-opment of new drugs are the discovery of the molecule and preclinical and toxicity tests,” says Glaucius Oliva, coordinator of the Center for Research and Innova-tion in Biodiversity and Drug Discovery (CIBFar), which is one of FAPESP’s Re-search, Innovation and Dissemination Centers (RIDC), involved in one of the molecular synthesis projects coordinated by Carlos Dias’s team at Unicamp. "With the financial support of large global or-ganizations at precisely that stage, the pharmaceutical industry is then ready to begin clinical trials and large-scale production. That begins to pique the interest of the pharmaceutical industry in relation to neglected diseases,” says Oliva, who was president of the National


Council for Scientific and Technologi-cal Development (CNPq). Oliva suggests that the partnership between the DNDi, MMV and Unicamp should serve as an example for other initiatives.

However, he notes other hurdles that Brazilian research must overcome to contribute more vigorously to studies of neglected diseases. One of these obsta-cles relates to pharmacokinetics, which concerns the mechanism by which a molecule travels in the body after ad-ministration. “Brazil still has very few people working in toxicology and syn-thetic and medicinal chemistry to cre-ate new molecules,” says Walter Colli, a biochemist and professor at the Uni-versity of São Paulo (USP) and member of FAPESP's Supervising Panel on Life Sciences.

A group of USP researchers has shown that the chemical synthesis of natural

compounds could improve the perfor-mance of existing drugs until new drugs are developed. The researchers were able to synthesize a molecule from be-talains, which are pigments found in flu-orescent flowers and beets. The com-pound has the ability to easily permeate animal cell membranes and serve as a fluorescent probe and marker for cell biology. “The fluorescent molecule can be functional, acting like a taxi, which only turns off its light when the drug is in the right place at the right time,” says Erick Bastos, a researcher with the Chemistry Institute at USP and the co-ordinator of the study.

The new molecule is in the testing phase. New drug development and phar-macological analyses are expensive, and Bastos’s group suggests that the com-pound could be used initially to improve the action of malaria drugs already avail-

“We need to form a large critical mass in the area of synthetic chemistry,” says Vanderlan Bolzani

able on the market. “Through in vitro tests we proved that betalains synthe-sized in the laboratory are able to over-come the malaria parasite membrane barrier. By using this technique, the usual dose of the drug can be reduced. Treatment efficiency improves because, by tracking the drug, we can find new ways to get the drug to the parasite,” Bastos says.

Research of this type could play an important role in the process of erad-icating some diseases. “By improving what we already have, we can increase the efficacy of a treatment in the short term,” says Dr. Carolina Batista, the Latin America medical director of the DNDi. One example cited by her is the treat-ment of Chagas disease using benzni-dazole, the drug most frequently used to treat the disease, through a method created in the 1970s.

Between 2012 and 2013, the DNDi commissioned a large study compar-ing benznidazole with E1224, a new molecule that showed promise in the fight against Chagas disease. Although it had performed well in in-vitro tests, E1224 was inefficient in clinical trials with patients. One part of the study con-ducted with benznidazole, however, was shown to be effective in the treatment of patients chronically ill with the dis-ease. Another study, published in 2014 by Spanish research institutions, found that benznidazole remains the most ef-fective compound for treating Chagas. “Still, benznidazole has complicated side effects, such as allergic reactions and headaches. This shows that even an old and widely used drug still needs to be improved and researched,” says Dr. Batista.

1 The Anopheles gambiae mosquito, the vector for malaria

2 In the digitally treated images, the compound extracted from fluorescent flowers permeates two erythrocyte membranes, one infected with plasmodium malaria

1

pESQUISA FApESp z29

One of the studies currently assessing the action of benznidazole involves the Dante Pazzanese Institute in São Paulo, WHO and institutions in Canada and Ar-gentina. More than 3,000 patients were recruited from various countries, and the first results will be released in 2015. “We’ve already been able to analyze the effect of the drug on children with Cha-gas and have reached the conclusion that we can decrease the dosage of benzni-dazole in children,” says Sergio Sosa-Estani, a DNDi member and director of the National Institute of Diagnostics and Research on Chagas disease, based in Buenos Aires.

WIDENING THE SEARCHEvent participants emphasized, how-ever, that new molecules to strengthen the fight against neglected diseases are needed. In 2012, the WHO released new guidelines for the control and elimina-tion of these diseases by 2020. According to the organization, Chagas and leish-maniasis pose enormous challenges. In the case of Chagas disease, today approx-imately 7.6 million people are infected worldwide. However, when taking into account its risk factors, including inad-equate housing in poorer regions, there are approximately 100 million people at risk of contracting the disease in Latin America alone, according to data from the DNDi. According to the WHO report, only 4.3% of total funding for research on neglected diseases is designated for Chagas and leishmaniasis research.

To correct this gap, the MMV and DNDi signed an agreement in Lon-don for the purpose of expanding re-search in this area. These institutions receive donations from governments,

companies and foundations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Jeremy Burrows, head of the MMV’s drug discovery department, explained that the organization's goal is to de-velop new compounds to treat malaria, which each year affects 80 million to 100 million people worldwide. “We are now collaborating with more than 300 partners and with the help of Brazilian science we can make enormous contri-butions to the fight against malaria,” says Burrows.

The DNDi is the result of a partner-ship between public research institu-tions and the pharmaceutical industry. The organization was established with funds from the humanitarian organiza-tion, Doctors Without Borders, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999 and today manages a network of 350 collab-orative initiatives in 43 countries. “We

put universities and industry in contact; if they worked alone, they could not de-velop new products,” says Robert Don, the DNDi’s director of discovery and preclinical development.

For the British chemist, Simon Camp-bell, an RSC member and advisor for the two entities in collaborative projects with the Unicamp team, the Brazilian scientif-ic community is known among those who conduct research on neglected diseases and has good laboratories and adequate levels of funding. However, he suggests that Brazil should invest more in the ar-eas of synthetic and medicinal chemistry, to transform its knowledge base of biol-ogy into new treatments. “We need more effective treatments with fewer side ef-fects. One way to speed up this process is to work in collaboration, and so we rely on the help of Brazilian scientists,” Campbell says.

This view is shared by Vanderlan Bol-zani, a Chemistry Institute researcher at Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). “We need to form a large critical mass in the area of synthetic chemistry, to encourage more young rese ar chers to work with preparing molecules that can contribute to the eradication of diseases such as malaria and Chagas,” she says. Opening the meeting, FAPESP’s scientific director, Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz, emphasized that the work-shop is an opportunity to bring together researchers from São Paulo and else-where in the world as well as two im-portant scientific foundations, FAPESP and the Royal Society of Chemistry. “The institutions involved are interested in sharing research information, so that results can be achieved more quickly,” says Brito Cruz. n Bruno de pierro

“By improving what we already have, we can increase the efficacy of a treatment,” says Dr. Carolina Batista

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Vines are remodeling the Amazon Region, and

bamboos are remodeling the Atlantic Forest

american ecologist Robyn Burn-ham gets up a little before dawn in a forest encampment 80 kilo-meters from the city of Manaus.

She emerges from her hammock, takes two quick gulps of coffee and enters the dense forest in search of lianas, a type of climbing vine that winds around trees. Unfazed by the constant heat and sweat, she uses red bands to mark the species she finds among tangles of leaves, branches and trunks; the marks will enable her to monitor their growth over the years. Burnham and her assistants then measure

Forests in transformation

the stems of the plants that are larger than one centimeter (cm) in diameter, collect a few samples of branches and transport them to the laboratory for species iden-tification and analysis.

On the basis of 35 years of field obser-vations, Burnham and other research-ers are seeing that liana populations are expanding in the midst of intact forests in the Amazonian interior. It is the first time that this phenomenon has been re-ported. According to previous research, lianas normally proliferate only in areas of degraded vegetation, such as forest

Rodrigo de Oliveira Andrade

fragments surrounded primarily by pas-tures and roads.

Although the census conducted in the Atlantic Forest has not been as extensive, bamboos appear to be remodeling for-est fragments, according to studies by re-searchers from the Botanical Institute of São Paulo (IBt). Both bamboos and lianas benefit from the fragile nature of environ-ments that have been disturbed for land-clearing purposes. These two observations suggest that both Amazonia and the At-lantic Forest may now be subject to previ-ously unknown environmental pressures.

Published in OctObeR 2014

Science bOtAny y

peSQUiSA FApeSp z 31

It has long been known that burnoffs, the clearing of vast stretches of native forest for farming and fishing, and even selective logging interfere with forest dynamics by altering the variety and growth rates of plant species. Now re-searchers are beginning to realize that other factors may also affect these dy-namics. American biologist William Lau-rance, the principal author of two 2014 papers published in the journal Ecology on liana behavior in the Amazon, thinks that one possible explanation for the in-creasing proliferation of these plants in non-degraded areas is the rising levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere.

Although lianas are abundant and diverse in forests worldwide, they are found in greater abundance, richness and variety of shapes and sizes in the tropics. Some lianas have fragile green-

ish stems that are nearly in-visible in forest interiors; oth-ers have tree-like bark and lounge moodily atop the for-est canopy.

Lianas are distributed across a variety of environ-ments. They can produce up to 40% of the leaves that cover trees, in addi-tion to producing seeds and small fruits that provide food for birds and small mammals. Lianas generally climb the trunks of trees in a spiral pattern, wind-ing around as if to strangle them. Lia-na-covered trees grow more slowly, are less reproductive and die sooner, and many trees cannot support the weight of these vines.

In light of this behavior, researchers are now finding that lianas can recon-figure tree communities and remodel

environments by promoting the survival of some species to the detriment of others.

In connection with her work on the identification of liana species, Burnham is gradually mapping the dis-

tribution of these plants in some parts of the Amazon. She has now identified 300 species, many of which have not yet been described. “We found more than 80 species in half a hectare!” says the University of Michigan-based ecologist, who visits the Amazon at least twice a year. “We hope this census will help us identify which liana species are benefit-ing most from this scenario and gaining more ground,” says Burnham, who, along with Laurance, is working on the Biolog-ical Dynamics of Forest Fragments Proj-ect (PDBFF) at Brazil’s National Institute e

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in the Amazon, liana populations are gaining ground in areas of continuous forest without any history of disturbance


trees, but especially lianas, thereby pro-moting forest remodeling. In the case of lianas, the rising concentrations of CO2 may be partly responsible for lower light levels in these environments, causing them to proliferate at a faster pace. In addition, the trees may be facing fiercer competition for space. “The competition for water, nutrients and light in continu-ous forests is also more intense between trees and lianas,” says Camargo. Under this scenario, trees of some species die earlier, while others succumb to liana proliferation. “It makes forest behavior more dynamic,” explains Laurance, who

Higher levels of atmospheric

cO2 appear to accelerate

the growth of trees and, to a greater extent, that of lianas, in

Amazonia

3

for Research in the Amazon (INPA). For over 30 years, this project has monitored developments in more than a thousand square kilometers (km²) of fragment-ed and continuous forests in Amazo-nia. Burnham’s work is also broadening other researchers’ understanding of the composition of liana communities and helping them to achieve a more in-depth understanding of the proliferation of these plants.

Over the course of 35 years, researchers involved in this program have gone into the field to analyze the growth and death rates of 60,000 trees and 178,295 saplings (less than 10 cm diameter at chest height) in 55 hectares of continuous forest and 39 hectares of fragmented forest. The continuous monitoring has resulted in a sophisticated database of information pertaining to the behavior of these for-ests. More recently, the researchers have also kept records of the populations of lia-nas, which represent a significant portion of the forests’ biomass and diversity but were not targeted in earlier forest cen-suses. They have monitored the growth of 35,000 lianas in 66 one-hectare plots of continuous forest and in fragments that vary in size from one to 100 hectares.

Through com-puter simulations, the researchers have observed that liana populations are expanding in forested areas with no history of dis-turbance. “This

was a surprise,” says José Luís Camargo, an ecologist based in São Paulo State who is the scientific coordinator of the PD-BFF. “Liana proliferation is common in areas adjacent to the edges of fragment-ed forests.”

Over the past 14 years, the population of lianas in intact forests near Manaus has increased at a rate 1% higher than ex-pected each year, according to Camargo. The researchers believe that these plants have proliferated in this area because of higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. CO2 appears to act as a fertilizer that ac-celerates the growth of both lianas and

ecologist Robyn burnham and her assistant, João batista da silva, during field work in 2013, when they collected and measured liana specimens

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peSQUiSA FApeSp z 33

Projectinfluence of Paradiolyra micrantha on the regeneration of an urban fragment of the Atlantic Forest (no. 05/51747-2); Grant mechanism Regular line of Research Project Award; Principal Investigator Maria tereza Grombone Guaratini (ibt-sP); Investment R$45,219.86 (FAPesP).

scientific articleslAuRAnce, W. F. et al. long-term changes in liana abun-dance and forest dynamics in undisturbed Amazonian forests. ecology. V. 95, no. 6, pp. 1604–11. 2014.GROMbOne-GuARAtini, M. t. et al. Atmospheric cO2 en-richment markedly increases photosynthesis and growth in a woody tropical bamboo from the brazilian Atlantic Forest. new Zealand Journal of Botany. V. 51, no. 4, pp. 275-85. december 2013.

4

lived in Brazil for five years and now works at James Cook University in Australia.

Lianas generally adapt better to disturbed forests, owing in part to a phenom-enon known as the edge ef-fect, which creates 32,000 km of new forest edge in the Amazon each year (see Pesquisa FAPESP Issue No. 205). In the transitional areas between dense forest and open fields, trees fall, dry up and die more easily as a result of excessive light, heat and wind. With more light, lianas—which are more drought-resistant and grow more efficiently—proliferate and easily reach the treetops. “These changes can reduce carbon storage, alter several aspects of forest ecology and reduce the diversity of tree species,” Camargo says. For this reason, he explains, lianas gen-erally help researchers understand the degree of disturbance in forests.

inTenSe cOMpeTiTiOnEvery day from November 2008 to Au-gust 2009, biologist Maria Tereza Grom-bone-Guaratini and her team from the Botanical Institute of São Paulo mea-sured and counted the lianas they found in sites, with and without bamboos, one kilometer apart in Fontes do Ipiranga State Park. The park, the third largest fragment of Atlantic Forest in the state

of São Paulo, is located 14 km from the center of the state capital. In this area, they al-so observed something un-expected: the lianas have to contend with the trouble-some presence of bamboos, which similarly require light and space to occupy the en-vironment. “In this competi-

tion, bamboos have an advantage over lianas,” says Grombone-Guaratini.

In this study, Grombone-Guaratini and her colleagues observed that woody bamboos of the species Aulonemia aris-tulata, which is native to the Atlantic Forest, release chemical compounds in-to the soil that inhibit tree growth and even the germination of lianas. Without trees, there is no support medium for lianas in their search for light, and they cannot wind around the smooth stems of bamboos. The researchers identified a total of 1,031 liana specimens more than 1 cm in diameter, of which 277 were located in areas dominated by bamboos and 754 were found elsewhere. Many of the lianas observed in environments with A. aristulata had thick stems, which, according to Grombone-Guara-tini, suggests that these plants existed there prior to the invasion of bamboo.

As in Amazonia, the bamboo prolif-eration may be related to rising con-centrations of atmospheric CO2. In 2013,

Grombone-Guaratini put this hypoth-esis to the test by growing young spec-imens of the species A. aristulata in two types of chambers: one with a high con-centration of CO2 and one with normal conditions.

After seven weeks, the bamboos grown in the chamber with higher CO2 levels showed a 70% increase in pho-tosynthesis, were 92% taller and dis-played a 104% larger leaf area than those grown in the other chamber. Un-der a global climate-change scenario, bamboos could dominate increasingly higher numbers of environments and affect the composition of tree species, Grombone-Guaratini says. Her obser-vations among bamboos in the Atlantic Forest may also hold true for lianas in Amazonia. n

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shoot of the bamboo species Aulonemia aristulata, which is native to the Atlantic Forest (left) specimen of the liana species Bauhinia guianensis in Amazonia (above)


BIOCHEMISTRY y

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Visible light, in addition to ultraviolet radiation,

may also cause skin cancer

Further danger from the sun

This finding is bad news for those who like to sunbathe, even if they slather on sunscreen. The currently available sunscreens

protect against the effects of ultraviolet radiation, which is invisible to the hu-man eye, but they cannot prevent the damage caused by visible light. This damage can be severe. A study conducted by São Paulo and Paraná researchers has recently demonstrated that visible light can also cause skin cancer, the most com-mon form of cancer in Brazil. According to Brazil’s National Cancer Institute, skin cancer accounts for 25% of cases of malignant tumors.

Maurício Baptista, a biochemist at the University of São Paulo (USP) and the study’s coordinator, is not surprised by this finding, which was published in No-vember 2014 on the journal PLoS ONE. Indeed, from a physical standpoint, the light that the human eye can detect has much in common with ultraviolet (UV) rays. Both types of light result from the same form of energy, electromagnetic radiation, which has different names – gamma rays, X-rays, visible light and infrared radiation – based on the fre-quency. “To skin, the distinction be-

tween visible and invisible light is ar-bitrary,” says Baptista, a researcher at USP’s Chemistry Institute and at the Research, Innovation and Dissemina-tion Centers (RIDC).

He and his team have shown that visible light can indirectly damage the genetic material (DNA) of cells by in-teracting with melanin. This dark pig-ment, which is responsible for skin color, absorbs some of the energy of visible light and transfers it to oxygen molecules, thus generating highly reac-tive forms of oxygen known as singlet oxygen. In turn, this excited oxygen molecule reacts with organic molecules such as DNA and degrades them. When this type of damage affects a gene that regulates cell proliferation, the cell can begin to multiply uncontrollably, caus-ing cancer.

This finding can help us to better un-derstand the origin of some forms of skin cancer. “The group’s contribution, which is very rigorous in scientific terms, helps us to understand the mutation profiles we found in human melanomas, where evidence of DNA oxidation events is of-ten observed,” says Roger Chammas, a researcher at the University of São Paulo

gilberto stam

School of Medicine and at the São Paulo State Cancer Institute. “In the past these events were attributed to UVA radiation, but now, as it turns out, it could also be the effect of visible light.”

The mechanism producing these more reactive molecules observed by Baptista’s group confirms melanin’s dual role: it protects the skin from damage caused by certain types of light while at the same time facilitating the damage caused by others. Like the current experiment, pre-vious studies had shown that exposure to ultraviolet type B (UVB) rays caused me-lanocytes (melanin-producing cells) to increase their synthesis of the pigment. The studies also showed that a greater proportion of these cells survived un-der this form of radiation. The mortality rate, however, was much higher when more pigmented cells were subjected to ultraviolet type A (UVA) radiation, a result that is similar to the current find-ings for visible light.

The protection that melanin offers against UVB rays is not sufficient to pre-vent skin cancer. This form of radiation is associated with sunburn, an acute in-flammatory response to excessive expo-sure to sunlight, and UVB was the first

PuBlISHEd In JanuaRY 2015


Projects1. Photosensitization in the life sciences (no. 12/50680-5); Grant mechanism Thematic Project; Principal inves-tigator Maurício da Silva Baptista (Chemistry Institute/uSP); Investment R$3,067,571.88 (FaPESP).

2. Redoxoma (no. 13/07937-8); Grant mechanism Re-search, Innovation and dissemination Centers (RIdC); Principal investigator Ohara augusto (Chemistry Insti-tute/uSP); Investment R$20,674,781.25 (for the entire project) (FaPESP).

Scientific articleCHIaREllI nETO, O. et al. Melanin photosensitization and the effect of visible light on epithelial cells. pLos one. november 18, 2014.

sunscreens currently on the market protect against UV radiation, but not the effects of visible light

radiation proven to be carcinogenic. It penetrates the skin slightly, but the UVB rays that are not absorbed by melanin go directly to DNA – particularly me-lanocyte DNA – and can damage it and cause a rare and very aggressive form of cancer: melanoma, which is more com-mon in adults with a fair complexion and represents 4% of the malignant skin tumors found in Brazil.

UVA radiation, like visible light, pen-etrates more deeply and causes DNA damage through the production of ex-cited and more reactive forms of oxygen. Research in the 1980s revealed that UVA rays cause another form of cancer – non-melanoma, which is more common after age 40 – originating in cells known as basal or squamous cells. After the harm-ful effects of UVA and UVB rays were proven, the pharmaceutical industry developed compounds that effectively block these two bands of radiation. How-ever, we are now beginning to see that this may not be sufficient. “Sunscreens only protect against ultraviolet rays, so the information about what protects the skin is incomplete,” says Baptista. “One important aspect is the regulation of packaging and advertising, so as not to disseminate misleading information.”

This is an issue yet to be resolved. Bap-tista recalls the case of UVA radiation. Although its harmful effect had been established for approximately 30 years, it was not until 2013 that manufacturers were required to indicate on the packag-ing whether a product protected against one or both types of UV radiation.

Baptista obtained the first evidence that visible light could also be harmful in 2011, when tests showed that singlet oxygen appeared when it interacted with pure melanin or the melanin found in

hair. “The discovery of the harmful ef-fects of UVA a few decades ago shat-tered the dogma that UVB was the only band of the solar spectrum that caused damage to the skin,” says Baptista. “Now we need to shatter the dogma that these harmful effects are only due to UV rays.”

To fully demonstrate the carcino-genic effect of visible light, however, at least one more step is needed. It must be shown that the DNA damage caused by visible light leads to profound genetic changes (mutations). “Tests will need to be done on animals and then in humans, and, if confirmed, this will be an impor-tant discovery,” says João Duprat Neto, an oncology surgeon and director of the Skin Cancer Group of the A.C. Camargo Cancer Center. “It is possible that this data will stimulate the development of more effective skin protectors.”

While waiting for sunscreens that also filter out visible light, the best way for people to protect against skin cancer is to avoid overexposure to the sun. How-ever, only excessive exposure must be prevented because another factor must be considered: sunlight is essential to the skin’s ability to synthesize vitamin D, which is important in prevention of osteoporosis and other bone diseases. According to Marco Antônio Oliveira, a dermatologist, who also works at the A.C. Camargo Skin Cancer Group, those who have a higher risk of developing skin cancer should replace sun exposure with vitamin D supplementation. The body’s production of vitamin D decreases after age 40, as the skin ages. “It's important to remember that the use of sunscreen is es-sential,” says Dr. Oliveira. “In the younger generations, which are better informed about the effects of the sun and use more sunscreens, the incidence of cancer has dropped significantly.” n

Dual roleMelanin is protective or harmful depending on the type of light

uVB rays, upon reaching melanocytes, stimulate the production of melanin. In excess, this radiation acts directly on dna and can damage it

uVa radiation and visible light, upon interacting with melanin, generate excited and more reactive forms of oxygen, which can damage cellular dna

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Teeth from a deer found

alongside human bones inside

a cave in the state of Piauí

suggest that humans were

present in the region more than

20,000 years ago

New pieces

Marcos pivetta

Pre-HisTory y

Two teeth from a large deer discovered at a prehistoric site in the vicinity of the Serra da Capivara National Park in São Raimundo Nonato, southern Piauí State,

will likely add fuel to the debate regarding the date of modern man’s arrival in the Americas. Two different laboratories independently dated these giant mammal remains, which were discov-ered at a depth of slightly over half a meter in the same geological layer of Toca do Serrote das Mo-endas in which human bones were recovered. One tooth was analyzed at the Department of Physics of the Riberão Preto Faculty of Philosophy, Sci-ence, Languages and Literature, which is part of the University of São Paulo (FFCLRP/USP); the other tooth was examined at the Department of Chemistry of Williams College in Massachu-setts. The results of both tests indicate similar results: 29,000 years in the first case and 24,000 in the second. At the Baixada Santista campus of the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp), a

of the puzzle

external view of Toca do serrote das Moendas in são raimundo Nonato

PublisHed iN JaNuary 2015

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Niède Guidon believes that Homo sapiens may have reached piauí by sea

the deer teeth and the concretion layer, obtained by three different laboratories, point to very ancient human occupa-tion of the region.” Fumdham manages the park in conjunction with the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conser-vation (ICMBio), a government agency within the Ministry of the Environment.

Guidon and her collaborators have been conducting research in the vicin-ity of the park—a UNESCO World Heri-tage site—since the 1970s, particularly in the fields of archeology and paleon-tology. Her team has catalogued 1,400 prehistoric sites in the Capivara Moun-tains, which has the largest concentra-tion in the Americas; 900 of these sites have rock paintings created thousands of

Piauí

serra da Capivara National Park

Marsh deer: animal depicted in the region’s rock paintings

third group ascertained the age of the concretion, that is, a compact layer rich in carbonates capping the sediments, in which the animal teeth and human skeleton fragments were discovered. As expected, the latter test confirmed that the concretion layer was younger than the layer that contained the animal re-mains: the soil sample was 21,000 years old. Equipment purchased with FAPESP funding was used in the two dating mea-surements performed in Brazil.

Based on the results of these three tests, the researchers believe that they have gathered indirect evidence of hu-man presence at least 20,000 years ago in what is today the semi-arid northeast region of Brazil, which is well before the date that traditional archeology posits for the peopling of the Americas. “The three dates line up,” says physicist Oswaldo Baffa, coordinator of the Ribeirão Preto/USP group and one of the study’s authors. “To mitigate any possible criticism, we were careful to have the samples ana-lyzed at three different places, where they worked blind, without knowing exactly what they were analyzing.” The classic view, as advocated by US groups, posits that the first Homo sapiens arrived on the continent approximately 13,000 years ago by crossing the Bering Strait, which separates Asia from Alaska. The conclu-sions derived from the tests on the mate-rial collected in the semi-arid Northeast cave were published in an article in the Journal of Human Evolution in December 2014. “There was no collagen that could be used to directly date the human bones from the cave using carbon 14,” says ar-cheologist Niède Guidon, another author of the paper and president of the Museum of the American Man Foundation (Fum-dham). “But the results of the dating of

1


years ago. In addition to human figures, the drawings on the rocks depict ani-mals, including marsh deer (Blastocerus dichotomus), which is the species whose teeth were found at Toca do Serrote das Moendas. Although there are numerous sites in the semi-arid state of Piauí, those sites have never provided human remains that could be carbon dated, which is the method that is generally employed to ascertain the age of organic matter (i.e., bones, shells, wood, coal, fabric) from as long ago as 50,000 years and in some cases even 100,000. Collagen, the organic portion of the bones that is indispensable to this dating technique, is a protein that is rarely preserved in the skeletons dis-covered in this region.

B ecause it was impossible to deter-mine the age of the bones discov-ered at what are potentially the

oldest of the Capivara Mountains sites, Guidon has almost always endeavored to establish an acceptable timeline for the environment in which human bone frag-ments have been unearthed and for the artifacts and remains that may have been produced by human hands. Over the past three decades, she has dated the remains of stone hearths and artifacts attributed to H. sapiens, along with ubiquitous rock paintings, a mark of human presence. Her results, which are still questioned by a significant portion of the scientific community, suggest a human presence in the region between 30,000 and 100,000 years ago; the hypothesis is that man ar-rived this early by way of an Atlantic sea route. The new study at Toca do Serrote das Moendas, a site located approximate-ly five kilometers from the park, has af-forded the archeologist additional data, based on other dating techniques, which can be applied to the controversial puzzle regarding when man first set foot in the Brazilian Northeast and, accordingly, in the Americas.

This prehistoric site generates new potential for analysis. The sizeable cave, which measures 35 meters by 23 meters at its greatest width, has supplied the remains of paleofauna, stone artifacts, ceramic fragments, and portions of three human skeletons, two of children and one of an adult. The two teeth of the marsh deer lay side by side, 35 centimeters away from the fragments of the adult skeleton and located at the same depth. This sce-

were found: optically stimulated lumi-nescence (OSL). This method measures levels of this type of light in the quartz crystals of a geological layer. “Theoreti-cally, the more intense the OSL signal, the older the sample,” explains Sonia Tatumi, the Unifesp physicist who analyzed two samples from the concretion layer at Toca do Serrote das Moendas. “Quartz absorbs blue light and emits OSL in the ultraviolet region,” she says. The data derived from a sample taken from the most central por-tion of the concretion were inconclusive. However, examination of a more external piece of the layer provided the results that appear in the scientific article: an age of 21,000 years, with a degree of accuracy of nearly 94%, according to Tatumi. n

Projectadvances in electron spin resonance dosimetry, archeo-logical dating and biomaterials characterization (No. 2007/06720-4); Grant mechanism regular Grant; Prin-cipal investigator oswaldo baffa (usP/ribeirão Preto); Investment r$507,101.73 (faPesP).

scientific articleKiNosHiTa, a. et al. dating human occupation at Toca do serrote das Moendas, são raimundo Nonato, Piauí--brazil by electron spin resonance and optically stimu-lated luminescence. Journal of Human Evolution. V. 77, p. 187-95. dec. 2014.p

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Human bones were found 35 cm away from two deer teeth (below) in the same geological layer

nario is an indication—although not ir-refutable proof—that man and animal may have co-existed during the same era.

Electron spin resonance (ESR)—also known as electron paramagnetic reso-nance spectroscopy—was used to date the teeth. The technique measures the amount of ionizing radiation incident on a sample using the spin concentra-tion prompted by energy deposited in the material. “In principle, the older a tooth, the greater the dose deposited in it,” says physicist Angela Kinoshita of Sacred Heart University (USC) in Bauru, São Paulo, and a post-doctoral researcher at the USP Department of Physics in Ri-beirão Preto, who examined one of the teeth using the technique. When dating a sample, in addition to recording the level of radiation stored in the tooth’s enamel and dentine, scientists must con-sider the specific conditions at the site in which the material being analyzed was discovered (i.e., local levels of radiation emitted by elements such as uranium, thorium, and potassium) as well as cos-mic radiation.

A different technique was used to date the carbonate-rich concretion layer that practically sealed off the sediment stratum in which the teeth and human remains

2

3


Luiz Hildebrando Pereira da Silva

was one of the most respected

parasitology experts in the world

OBITUARY y

The tropical disease scientist

Researcher and public health phy-sician Luiz Hildebrando Pereira da Silva died on September 24, 2014, in São Paulo at the age of

86. He had been previously hospitalized for pneumonia at the Heart Institute (InCor) in São Paulo. Hildebrando did not respond to treatment and suffered multiple organ failure. The researcher's coffin was available for viewing only by family and friends, as reported by one of his closest friends, parasitologist Erney Plessmann de Camargo, researcher at the Institute of Biomedical Sciences, Univer-sity of São Paulo (USP). “I met Hildeb-rando at the USP School of Medicine in 1959, and we worked together on many research projects,” said Camargo, who collaborated with Hildebrando on ma-laria research in the state of Rondônia.

A professor emeritus at USP and at the Federal University of Rondônia, Luiz Hildebrando was one of the most re-spected specialists in tropical medicine in the world. He spent most of his career

thrill of discovery," as he recounted in an interview in 2013 when he won an award from the Conrado Wessel Foundation in the Medicine category, the twelfth time that the honor had been given.

Invited to become an assistant profes-sor of parasitology at the University of São Paulo School of Medicine (FMUSP), he returned to São Paulo and carried out research on chemotherapy for American trypanosomiasis from 1956 to 1960. Af-ter passing the exam to become an as-sociate professor, he obtained a grant from the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) to carry out post-doctoral research. He spent a year at the Free University in Brussels. In 1962 and 1963 he worked at the Pasteur Institute with researcher François Jacob, who, along with Jacques Monod, had just published their model for the regulation of gene expression in prokaryotes that would earn them the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1965. He returned to Brazil in late 1963 and set

at the Pasteur Institute in France, where he moved after being persecuted by the military government established in Bra-zil in 1964, when he was an associate professor at the USP School of Medicine. He returned to Brazil in the 1990s and began research on malaria in Rondônia.

He completed his degree in Medicine at USP in 1953, and the following year he traveled with parasitologist Samuel Pessoa to Misericórdia de Piancó, in the scrublands of the state of Paraíba, where he helped organize the Parasitology Lab-oratory and taught classes in the field at the new João Pessoa School of Medicine. There he studied the epidemiology of schistosomiasis and Chagas disease from 1954 to 1956. It was in this location that, through the lens of a microscope and the light of an amateurish electrical connec-tion, he saw the parasite Schistosoma mansoni, which was very common along the northeastern coast, but until then had never been seen in the scrublands. For the first time, he felt "the aesthetic

1

PUBLISHed In OcTOBeR 2014


up the Laboratory for Protozoa Genet-ics at the USP School of Medicine with researcher Erney Camargo.

Then came the military coup. A mili-tant communist since adolescence, Luiz Hildebrando was imprisoned for three months on the ship Raul Soares after hav-ing been reported for collecting money and giving asylum to individuals being hunted. He was fired from his university post by an act of Governor Ademar de Barros on the last day on which Institu-tional Act No. 1 was in force. He returned to Paris and to the Pasteur Institute, but in 1967, spurred by a campaign to repatri-ate scientists, sponsored by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he taught a course in Brazil on molecular genetics at the USP Biochemistry Department. The follow-ing year, he accepted a position as pro-fessor in the Genetics Department at the USP Ribeirão Preto campus, researching the genetics of unicellular eukaryotes. In 1969, he was again discharged, this time by Institutional Act No. 5, and he returned to Paris and his positions at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the Pasteur Institute. During his exile, he became a key well-known intellectual for Brazilian exiles in France as the political secretary of the Brazilian Communist Party in Paris.

In 1971, he was appointed Head of the Cell Differentiation Unit in the Mo-lecular Biology Department of the Pas-teur Institute. In 1976, he was invited by Jacques Monod, director of the Pas-teur Institute to organize a new unit for Experimental Parasitology. The unit was established in 1978 to carry out research on the molecular biology of malaria para-

sites, especially Plasmodium falciparum. It was a period of intense activity, with a team that carried out studies in experi-mental models and human volunteers on malaria vaccine candidate molecules.

In 1990, while still in Paris, he orga-nized a research team in Rondônia in collaboration with Erney Camargo. He retired from the Pasteur Institute in 1996 and decided to return to Brazil. He was hired as a full professor of parasitology by USP in 1997, and assumed management of the research programs in Rondônia, in USP’s active front in the Amazon. Over the course of a decade, under his capa-ble direction the percentage of malaria cases reported in Rondônia decreased from 40% to 7% of the total number of cases of disease in the Amazon region.” He went on to establish the Center for Research in Tropical Medicine (Cepem) under the Rondônia Health Department, and founded the Tropical Pathology Re-search Institute (Ipepatro), which brings together specialists and researchers trained in the graduate programs at the Federal University of Rondônia. Ipepa-tro was absorbed by the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation and became one of the five new Fiocruz units in 2009. Luiz Hildeb-rando Pereira da Silva was married and had five children. np

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When he saw Schistosoma mansoni in the scrublands for the first time, when it had previously been found only along the coast, he felt “the aesthetic thrill of discovery”

2


Luiz Hildebrando Pereira da Silva

was one of the most respected

parasitology experts in the world

OBITUARY y

The tropical disease scientist

Researcher and public health phy-sician Luiz Hildebrando Pereira da Silva died on September 24, 2014, in São Paulo at the age of

86. He had been previously hospitalized for pneumonia at the Heart Institute (InCor) in São Paulo. Hildebrando did not respond to treatment and suffered multiple organ failure. The researcher's coffin was available for viewing only by family and friends, as reported by one of his closest friends, parasitologist Erney Plessmann de Camargo, researcher at the Institute of Biomedical Sciences, Univer-sity of São Paulo (USP). “I met Hildeb-rando at the USP School of Medicine in 1959, and we worked together on many research projects,” said Camargo, who collaborated with Hildebrando on ma-laria research in the state of Rondônia.

A professor emeritus at USP and at the Federal University of Rondônia, Luiz Hildebrando was one of the most re-spected specialists in tropical medicine in the world. He spent most of his career

thrill of discovery," as he recounted in an interview in 2013 when he won an award from the Conrado Wessel Foundation in the Medicine category, the twelfth time that the honor had been given.

Invited to become an assistant profes-sor of parasitology at the University of São Paulo School of Medicine (FMUSP), he returned to São Paulo and carried out research on chemotherapy for American trypanosomiasis from 1956 to 1960. Af-ter passing the exam to become an as-sociate professor, he obtained a grant from the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) to carry out post-doctoral research. He spent a year at the Free University in Brussels. In 1962 and 1963 he worked at the Pasteur Institute with researcher François Jacob, who, along with Jacques Monod, had just published their model for the regulation of gene expression in prokaryotes that would earn them the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1965. He returned to Brazil in late 1963 and set

at the Pasteur Institute in France, where he moved after being persecuted by the military government established in Bra-zil in 1964, when he was an associate professor at the USP School of Medicine. He returned to Brazil in the 1990s and began research on malaria in Rondônia.

He completed his degree in Medicine at USP in 1953, and the following year he traveled with parasitologist Samuel Pessoa to Misericórdia de Piancó, in the scrublands of the state of Paraíba, where he helped organize the Parasitology Lab-oratory and taught classes in the field at the new João Pessoa School of Medicine. There he studied the epidemiology of schistosomiasis and Chagas disease from 1954 to 1956. It was in this location that, through the lens of a microscope and the light of an amateurish electrical connec-tion, he saw the parasite Schistosoma mansoni, which was very common along the northeastern coast, but until then had never been seen in the scrublands. For the first time, he felt "the aesthetic

1

PUBLISHed In OcTOBeR 2014


up the Laboratory for Protozoa Genet-ics at the USP School of Medicine with researcher Erney Camargo.

Then came the military coup. A mili-tant communist since adolescence, Luiz Hildebrando was imprisoned for three months on the ship Raul Soares after hav-ing been reported for collecting money and giving asylum to individuals being hunted. He was fired from his university post by an act of Governor Ademar de Barros on the last day on which Institu-tional Act No. 1 was in force. He returned to Paris and to the Pasteur Institute, but in 1967, spurred by a campaign to repatri-ate scientists, sponsored by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he taught a course in Brazil on molecular genetics at the USP Biochemistry Department. The follow-ing year, he accepted a position as pro-fessor in the Genetics Department at the USP Ribeirão Preto campus, researching the genetics of unicellular eukaryotes. In 1969, he was again discharged, this time by Institutional Act No. 5, and he returned to Paris and his positions at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the Pasteur Institute. During his exile, he became a key well-known intellectual for Brazilian exiles in France as the political secretary of the Brazilian Communist Party in Paris.

In 1971, he was appointed Head of the Cell Differentiation Unit in the Mo-lecular Biology Department of the Pas-teur Institute. In 1976, he was invited by Jacques Monod, director of the Pas-teur Institute to organize a new unit for Experimental Parasitology. The unit was established in 1978 to carry out research on the molecular biology of malaria para-

sites, especially Plasmodium falciparum. It was a period of intense activity, with a team that carried out studies in experi-mental models and human volunteers on malaria vaccine candidate molecules.

In 1990, while still in Paris, he orga-nized a research team in Rondônia in collaboration with Erney Camargo. He retired from the Pasteur Institute in 1996 and decided to return to Brazil. He was hired as a full professor of parasitology by USP in 1997, and assumed management of the research programs in Rondônia, in USP’s active front in the Amazon. Over the course of a decade, under his capa-ble direction the percentage of malaria cases reported in Rondônia decreased from 40% to 7% of the total number of cases of disease in the Amazon region.” He went on to establish the Center for Research in Tropical Medicine (Cepem) under the Rondônia Health Department, and founded the Tropical Pathology Re-search Institute (Ipepatro), which brings together specialists and researchers trained in the graduate programs at the Federal University of Rondônia. Ipepa-tro was absorbed by the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation and became one of the five new Fiocruz units in 2009. Luiz Hildeb-rando Pereira da Silva was married and had five children. np

ho

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O R

Am

OS

2 F

Am

ILY

AR

cH

Ive

S

When he saw Schistosoma mansoni in the scrublands for the first time, when it had previously been found only along the coast, he felt “the aesthetic thrill of discovery”

2


GEOLOGY y

SP

Rio Grande Rise

MG

PR

SC

RS1.300 km

RJ

ES

PESQUISA FAPESP z 43

Great blocks of rock from different

ages and origins combined

to form the South Atlantic margins

of

ecHos

No, it wasn’t a mistake. In 2011, geologists collected samples of granite, a type of continen-tal rock, from the Rio Grande

Rise, a chain of submerged mountains approximately 1,300 kilometers (km) off the coast of the state of Rio Grande do Sul. Scientists had thought that these mountains were the result of formation of the ocean floor and volcanic eruptions and that they therefore were composed of a different type of rock. Two years later, using a submersible craft, research-ers collected additional samples of con-tinental rock, and the resulting analysis supported the hypothesis that this region of the South Atlantic was actually a piece of a continent submerged when South America and Africa separated—a process that began 120 million years ago.

This finding is economically valuable for the Rio Grande Rise. In July 2014, the Brazilian government received the green light to implement its plan to explore

cobalt deposits in the region, which lie in international wa-ters; hence, finding reserves of other minerals, such as nickel, manganese and rare earths, has become more likely. The sci-

entific value of the formation has also increased inasmuch as it offers addi-tional arguments supporting the hy-pothesis that the separation of South America from Africa is a more fascinat-ing and complicated process than ear-lier thought. Geologists from Brazil, the United States, Germany and France met in Rio de Janeiro in April 2014 and con-cluded that the great blocks of rock, or microplates, that composed the two con-tinents and seabed did not separate like two parts of a torn sheet of paper; rath-er, the continents stretched out, broke apart and were chaotically repositioned. Certain portions may have been repo-sitioned in the middle and submerged, while others separated and combined, forming an immense mosaic that is now becoming clearer.

Researchers believe that rocks collect-ed from the Rio Grande Rise—granites, granulites, gneisses and pegmatites—are 500 million to 2.2 billion years old, ac-cording to analyses conducted by teams from the University of Brasília and the Geological Survey of Brazil (CPRM). “The ages are not outside what we usu-ally find in South America and Africa,” says Roberto Ventura Santos, director of

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geology at CPRM. Ventura says that the seismic uplifts indicate that the thick-ness of the crust in this area is nearly 30 km, “typical of continental rather than oceanic crust,” further supporting the theory that it is a part of a continent.

This discovery, one of the most spec-tacular in Brazilian geology in recent times, has raised a number of questions. According to earlier thinking, the two mountain chains in the South Atlantic—the Rio Grande and the Mid-Atlantic Ridge—formed during the same period, but now scientists think that this may

not be the case. In addition, what are the effects of the Rio Grande Rise? A chain of mountains 3,200 meters high at the bottom of the South Atlantic, the top of which is only 800 meters beneath the surface of the ocean, should create barri-ers to ocean circulation, but researchers do not understand the underlying mech-anism. Ventura believes that analysis of a 70-meter column of sediment from the seabed will provide some answers, which he hopes will enable reconstruc-tion of the climatic and geological phe-nomena of the past seven million years.

“The identification of continental rocks from the Rio Grande Rise changes the evolutionary picture of the South At-lantic, which was formed by the break-up of the two continents,” explains geologist Peter Christian Hackspacher, a professor at São Paulo State University (Unesp) in Rio Claro. Some 20 years ago, when do-ing field research in southeastern and southern Brazil, Namibia, and Angola, he studied signs of possible forces that led to the separation of South America and Africa. His findings support the tra-ditional model, in which the coastlines of the two continents, representing the blocks of rock that formed them, fit to-gether. The coastline of northeastern Brazil fits with that of West Africa, but in other regions, such as the coast of Rio de Janeiro State, parts appear to be missing from the jigsaw puzzle of rocks.

SERRA do MAR REJUvENAtEdThe blocks of rock that once made up a single continent fragmented and aligned with older or newer blocks to form the mountainous region of southeastern Bra-zil and West Africa, concludes Hack-spacher, whose research is carried out in collaboration with teams headed by Ulrich Glasmacher in Germany, Antonio Olímpio Gonçalves in Angola and Ana Olívia Magalhães at the Federal Uni-versity of Alfenas in the state of Minas Gerais. Contrary to expectations, older blocks—such as the Mantiqueira and Bocaina mountain ranges, which were uplifted 120 million years ago—are in the continental interior, and more recent blocks that are 35 to 20 million years old are on the margins, such as the coastline between the states of Paraná and Rio Grande do Sul (see map).

“I’m not discovering the wheel, I’m just measuring by using other tech-niques,” he says, acknowledging the conceptual baselines offered by pro-fessors at the University of São Paulo (USP), such as Fernando Almeida, Um-berto Cordani and Benjamim Bley Brito Neves, who had already recognized that

Effects of uplift after the opening of the Atlantic: valley of a river in West Central Angola with rocks formed 2 billion years ago...

Rocks of many ages

SoURCE AdAPTEd frOM KArL M. et al.

Collection sites

n Quaternary sediments (1.8 million years ago to the present)n basalt spills of the Paraná basin from the Cretaceous (134 million years)n Alkaline intrusions from the Cretaceous n Sedimentary rocks from the Jurassic (206 to 142 million years) to the Cretaceousn Sedimentary rocks from the Permian (290 to 248 million years)n Sedimentary rocks from the Permian to the Carboniferous (354 to 290 million years)n Sedimentary rocks from the ordovician (495 to 443 million) and Devonian (417 to 354 million years)n Precambrian basement (4.6 billion to 545 million years)

PESQUISA FAPESP z 45

South America was formed from micro-plates of rocks of different ages and var-ied origins (see Pesquisa FAPESP Issue No. 188). Claudio Ricommini, also from USP, challenged the customary view of the continent’s formation somewhat fur-ther when he ascertained that the age of rocks from the Taubaté sedimentary basin was between 33 million and 55 mil-lion years—far from the 120 million years that had been hypothesized because of their proximity to the coastline.

Almost 10 years ago, with equipment on hand to measure the age and tem-perature variation of rocks according to depth—the lower the temperature, the closer to the surface and the more recent the rock is—Magalhães proposed to Hackspacher, her thesis advisor at the time, that they examine the ages of rocks distant from the coast in south-ern and southeastern Brazil. They start-ed from the assumption that older and more recent blocks of rock rise and sink and become exposed on the surface in an alternating manner. From there, “It was possible to develop very good, geo-logically consistent findings with a reasonable degree of statistical reliability about the processes responsible for the crustal uplift of the Serra do Mar and Man-

tiqueira ranges,” she says. In a series of “spectacular discoveries” (Hackspach-er’s description), they found blocks of rock, uplifted 60 to 90 million years ago, that did not fit the classic model of the formation of South America separation from Africa.

Hundreds of measurements led to conclusions that are helping scientists break down old notions. One example is the probable age of the Serra do Mar, a mountain chain that stretches for nearly 1,500 km along the Brazilian coast, be-tween the states of Espírito Santo and Santa Catarina. “Until 10 years ago, when we began to zone in on the problem and challenge some of the assumptions about the geological evolution of the South Atlantic,” Hackspacher says, “everyone understood that the Serra do Mar was formed 120 million years ago. But now we are seeing that the chain is only 35 million years old and is not a conse-quence of the continental separation.”

The fact that the Tietê River flows westward is an indication of a more recent geological phenomena. Ac-

cording to Hackspacher, if the range had formed 120 million years ago, the river would probably flow toward the ocean rather than inland. Today, the

most widely probed hypothesis is that this mountain chain resulted from the formation of the Andes, beginning about 60 million years ago, which may have generated large waves that affected the topography, creating depressions such as the Pantanal wetlands in the state of Mato Grosso and peaks such as the Man-tiqueira and Serra do Mar. “I don’t find it hard to accept that possibility, but there is not yet sufficient evidence,” he says.

Hackspacher and his colleagues are seeing similar phenomena in Namibia and Angola. In research conducted in June 2014 that complements the land-based surveys, a German oceanographic vessel recorded signs of rock plates near the coast of Namibia that are similar in age to the Rio Grande Rise. n

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Projecthistory of exhumation of the South American platform in Southeastern brazil: thermochronology by fission track analysis and ar/ar and sm/nd systematics (no. 2000/03960-5); Grant mechanism Thematic project; Principal investigator Peter C. hackspacher (unesp); In-vestment r$1,282,335.65 (fAPESP).

Scientific articlesKArL, M. et al. Evolution of the South Atlantic passive continental margin in southern brazil derived from zircon and apatite (u–Th–Sm)/he and fission-track data. tecto-nophysics. V. 604, pp. 224-44. 2013.SALOMOn, f. et al. Major paleostress field differences on complementary margins of the South Atlantic. EGU 13, p. 10894. 2013.


Meteorologists want to know why

the wind is so strong on Venus and Titan

The days pass slowly on Venus. The planet rotates notably slowly. Venus is approximately the size of Earth but takes 243

Earth days to make a complete rotation. Because of its slow rotation, meteorolo-gists expected that Venus' atmosphere would be among the calmest in the Solar System. However, the probes that were sent to the planet observed constant wind in the upper atmosphere, where the wind speeds reach 400 km/h. Such intense winds only occur on Earth dur-ing hurricanes or sporadically at high altitudes. On Venus, it is always windy, particularly around the equator.

To try to solve this mystery, João Rafa-el Dias Pinto, a meteorologist at the Uni-versity of São Paulo (USP), and Jonathan Lloyd Mitchell, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, created a simplified computer model of a planet with an atmosphere. Simulations using this model, which were published in August 2014 in the journal Icarus, are the first to correctly describe how the winds that sweep Venus are maintained. This phenomenon, which is known as atmospheric superrotation, is also ob-

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Perturbed atmosphere

served on Titan, Saturn's largest moon. “We identified new, important mech-anisms that help us understand these winds better,” says Mitchell.

According to the new model, the se-cret of superrotation is the manner in which heat is distributed in the atmo-spheres of Venus and Titan. Through vertical circulation, the heat spreads more slowly upward and toward the poles on Venus and Titan than on Earth. Additionally, a special type of ripple in the atmosphere affects the gas currents.

Venus and Titan are so different from each other that the similar behaviors of their atmospheres appear strange. Venus’ surface temperature can reach 477°C because of the greenhouse effect of its atmosphere, which is rich in carbon dioxide gas. On Titan, the temperature is -180°C, and methane rain feeds the lakes on its surface. However, when the space probe Huygens descended to the surface of Titan in 2005, it discovered that the wind profile was almost iden-tical to that on Venus, which was pre-viously observed by the Venera-series Soviet probes in the 1970s and 1980s. Although the winds are weak on the sur-

Planet Venus, photographed by the European probe Venus Express: its size is similar to the Earth's, and its winds travel at 400 km/h

Igor ZolnerkevicPubliShEd iN NOVEMbER 2014


face, the winds at the equators of Venus and Titan reach 360 km/h at an altitude above 50 km, whereas the winds at the identical altitude at the Earth’s equator are under 15 km/h.

BEyond rotAtIonDias Pinto explains that on Earth, the mass of air that circles the globe is driven by the difference in temperature between the equator and the poles and is dragged along by the rotation of the planet. Thus, meteorologists expected weaker winds on planets and satellites that rotate more slowly. Researchers have been seeking an explanation for superrotation since the 1970s and concluded that in addi-tion to slower rotation, there is prob-ably a specific oscillation pattern in the motion of the atmosphere. This pattern of atmospheric waves helps create an intense air jet that is concentrated at the equator and covers almost all of the celestial body. “It is as if the entire at-mosphere moved in a single direction,” explains Pinto, “the problem is that most atmospheric models of Venus and Titan, including the most realistic, find it dif-ficult to reproduce superrotation.”

Pinto decided to study superrotation during his PhD studies. At a conference in 2011 in France, he met Mitchell, an expert on Titan and Venus who was in-terested in attacking the problem with a simpler model. “With a more idealized model, I can better control the dynam-ics of the atmosphere,” says Pinto. He worked under the guidance of Mitch-ell and the Brazilians Rosmeri Porfírio da Rocha and Tércio Ambrizzi, of the USP Institute of Astronomy, Geophysics and Atmospheric Sciences (IAG), and he could simulate superrotation using an at-mospheric model for weather forecasting.

By modifying some parameters in this model, Pinto discovered that decreasing the planet rotation was not sufficient to accelerate the rotation of the atmo-sphere. “João demonstrated that the model only develops superrotation if it transports heat from the equator to the poles more slowly,” explains Mitchell, noting that on Venus and Titan, despite the strong winds, the air circulates no-tably slower in the vertical direction.

Pinto also identified a special form of planetary wave in his simulations, which arises from the oscillations in

the air currents at the planet's equator. “These planetary waves are the main drivers and maintainers of superrota-tion,” explains Mitchell.

“These aspects of superrotation have never been analyzed in detail,” says Se-bastien Lebonnois, a planetary scientist of the National Council for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France who stud-ies the superrotation of Venus and Ti-tan. “To confirm this analysis, we would need wind and temperature observations with a resolution that is difficult to ob-tain even on Earth.” Despite the diffi-culty, he hopes to obtain evidence from the Venus Express probe data, which is orbiting Venus, or the Cassini orbiter, which is near Titan. n

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intense gusts arise in narrow bands of the atmosphere, which are driven by the planet's rotation

As the wind blowsThe air current regimes on Earth and Mars are milder than those on Venus and Titan

ProjectWave-mean flow interaction and atmospheric superrotation in terrestrial planets (No. 12/13202-8); Grant mechanism doctoral Fellowship – Research internships Abroad; Princi-pal investigator Tercio Ambrizzi (iAG/uSP); Grant recipient João Rafael dias Pinto; Investment R$40,381.84 (FAPESP).

Scientific articlediAS PiNTO, J. R. and MiTchEll, J. l. Atmospheric super-rotation in an idealized GcM: Parameter dependence of the eddy response. Icarus. V. 238. p.93-109. Aug. 2014.

TiTAN VENuS EARTh MARS


Brazilians discover how to measure

energy variations in atomic nuclei

Spins engines

in an experiment thought to be im-possible until last year, a team coor-dinated by physicist Roberto Sierra, of the Federal University of the ABC

(UFABC), determined how much en-ergy an atomic nucleus can gain or lose when it is hit by a radio wave pulse. Most researchers were convinced that the behavior of the nucleus would be unpredictable. It was believed that we would never know the probability that the nucleus would absorb the wave’s energy and thus become hotter or, con-versely, transmit some of its energy to the wave and thus become cooler.

The new experiments, carried out at the Brazilian Center for Physics Research (CBPF) in Rio de Janeiro, demonstrate that this energy exchange obeys physical laws never before tested on the subatom-ic level. These laws could help us bet-ter understand chemical reactions such as plant photosynthesis and determine how much energy quantum computers will need to operate. “This is the first ex-periment in a new area of physics called quantum thermodynamics,” says Serra.

Quantum computers are expected to exponentially surpass the computational

power of conventional computers by tak-ing advantage of the laws of quantum me-chanics. But how much power will this new type of computing need in practice? How much heat will these machines pro-duce? Will they need refrigeration? One of the goals of quantum thermodynamics is to answer these questions.

Similar questions abounded during in the nineteenth century. For steam en-gines to reach their maximum efficiency, what is the minimum amount of coal that furnaces require, and at what tem-perature should boilers be maintained? Scientists of the era realized that both heat and the ability of machines to work are different forms of the same physical quantity, energy, which is neither cre-ated from nothing nor destroyed, only transformed. When investigating the conversion of one form of energy into another, they discovered the laws of clas-sical thermodynamics.

According to these laws, energy flows spontaneously from a hotter body to a cooler one. A machine, even if ideal, can only convert part of the available energy in the form of heat into energy able to perform mechanical movements, that is,

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to perform what is known in physics as work. “Thermodynamics imposes limits on any technology,” says Serra.

Victorian engineers solved their prob-lems, but at the expense of a little trick. Their calculations only worked when machines were assumed to be insulated from the rest of the world, exchanging little heat with the environment. The pro-cesses also had to be slow. However, these approximations do not apply to most situ-ations that occur in nature—for example, in many chemical reactions. When an ob-ject cannot be thermally isolated from its environment for a long time, its tempera-ture rises and falls in a seemingly unpre-dictable manner, contrary to what occurs in isolated systems, in which everything tends toward equilibrium.

It was only in 1997 that the physical chemist Christopher Jarzynski discov-ered a mathematical expression for cal-culating the variations in energy and me-chanical work when out of equilibrium. “Jarzynski’s equation and other theo-rems on fluctuations allowed chemists to measure, in a laboratory, the variation in energy of a molecule before and after a reaction,” explains Serra.

PuBlished in decemBer 2014

pESQuISa FapESp z 49


radio

time to study quantum thermodynam-ics in the laboratory. The partnership between the two groups has already re-sulted in several discoveries (see Pes-quisa FAPESP Issue No. 193).

A small test tube containing a solu-tion of pure chloroform diluted in wa-ter is located at the heart of the equip-ment in the CBPF laboratory. Each of the approximately 1 trillion chloroform molecules in the solution contains a carbon-13 atom. The nucleus of this type of carbon has a quantum property called spin, which is represented like the arrow of the needle of a magnetic compass. Under a strong magnetic field parallel to the tube, pointing upward, the spin arrows of the carbon atoms tend to align with the field, with half of them pointing down and half pointing up. The magnetic field also causes the atoms with spins pointing downward to have more energy than those with spins facing upward.

Physicists manipulate the spin direc-tions using electromagnetic fields that oscillate at a frequency of 125 megahertz (the equipment must be electro-magnet-ically insulated such that it is not influ-enced by FM radio stations that transmit

the quantum engineexperiment extracts energy from chloroform molecules

chloroform molecules

diluted in water

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is very efficient, and generates almost no heat,” says Serra. “Studies suggest that it is a quantum process.”

Serra and his students and colleagues at UFABC, along with the team of physi-cists Alexandre Souza, Ruben Auccauise, Roberto Sarthour and Ivan Oliveira, who work with nuclear magnetic resonance techniques at CBPF, have tried for some

Jarzynski, in collaboration with a team in California, confirmed his equation in 2005 by observing the mechanical work of an RNA molecule stretched and com-pressed like a spring. Serra notes, how-ever, that despite being microscopic, the movement of the RNA molecule was suf-ficiently large to be calculated using the famous formula derived from the laws of Newtonian mechanics: “Work is equal to force times displacement.”

The equations of thermodynamics, whether in equilibrium or not, were de-rived using Newtonian mechanics. How-ever, Newton’s laws lose their meaning for various processes that take place in molecules and for anything that occurs within atoms because forces and dis-placements cannot be measured pre-cisely. On these scales, the laws of quan-tum mechanics apply. Serra wanted to know whether equations such as Jar-zynski’s are still applicable at the sub-atomic scale. This knowledge will help us understand chemical reactions such as photosynthesis. In photosynthesis, molecules in the cells of leaves act like quantum machines that absorb energy from light particles and store it in the form of sugar molecules. “The process

in the presence of a magnetic field,

carbon-13 nuclei in chloroform behave

like a magnetic compass, with the spin

direction pointing up or down.

radio waves control the spin directions

until they reach thermal equilibrium

prEparatIon opEratIon

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energy to the carbon nuclei,

forcing the atomic spins

out of equilibrium

Another sequence of pulses, now with

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the spins again and absorbs part

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the spins are manipulated and

return to their initial state

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the fact that the physicists tried to di-rectly measure how many times en-ergy was emitted or absorbed by the atoms. “The cumulative error in these measurements was so great that, in the end, they were unable to determine anything,” he explains.

IntEllIgEnt mEaSurEmEnt The solution came earlier for Serra, in February 2013, when the physicist Mauro Paternostro, of Queen’s Univer-sity in Belfast, Ireland, gave a seminar at UFABC on unpublished proposals to observe the work produced by light par-ticles indirectly. Shortly after that, Pa-ternostro, currently a visiting professor at UFABC, and Laura Mazzola, his col-league in Belfast, began discussing with Serra, Auccauise and UFABC doctoral student Tiago Batalhão how to adapt these techniques to observe the work due to carbon atom spin indirectly. With John Good, of the University of Oxford, England, the team discovered a clever way to use the spin of the hydrogen nu-clei in chloroform molecules to indicate what happens to the spin of carbon at-oms while performing work without interfering in the process.

at that frequency). This manipulation is performed using wave pulses that last no more than a few microseconds. The experiment takes place so quickly that it is as if each carbon atom in the test tube were isolated from the rest of the universe for a brief moment and sub-jected to a temperature close to abso-lute zero (-273º Celsius). The research-ers are able to increase or decrease the energy difference between the atoms with up and down spin by reducing or increasing the amplitude of the radio waves. When the amplitude changes very quickly, the carbon atoms are no longer thermally isolated and begin to both absorb energy from radio waves—which is when the waves do work on the atoms—and transmit part of their energy to the waves, thereby perform-ing work on them. “This is very difficult to measure because carbon atoms with spin can exchange energy in one of four ways, all happening at once, in a proba-bilistic manner,” says Serra. “I know of a group in Germany that tried to carry out the same experiment for five years without success.”

What hindered the success of the German group, according to Serra, was

The precision of the experiment was sufficient to record temperature varia-tions in the carbon spin on the order of billionths of a degree and verify that the Jarzinsky equation is valid on the sub-atomic scale. Another interesting result is that the atomic spins had a greater tendency to extract energy from the ra-dio waves when the amplitude of the wave pulse was smaller. The opposite happened when the wave amplitude was increased: the spin of the atoms tended to transfer energy to the waves; in other words, the atoms performed work on the waves.

“We could exploit this difference to create a quantum heat engine,” says Ser-ra. The engine would work by alternat-ing low- and high-amplitude pulses be-tween two states in thermal equilibrium, each with a different temperature (see infographic). The engine would work in a manner similar to that of a combus-tion engine, which performs mechanical work with some of the chemical energy transformed into heat through combus-tion of the fuel.

Such a spin engine would not be very useful: the work produced would supply such a small amount of energy to the ra-dio waves that it would be sufficient only to alter the spin of an atomic nucleus. Serra is more interested in measuring how much energy it uses and how much heat it dissipates during operation.

“The technique applied in this experi-ment has great potential,” says physicist Lucas Céleri, of the Federal University of Goiás, who intends to observe the ther-modynamics of a single photon together with physicists Paulo Souto Ribeiro and Stephen Walborn, of the Federal Uni-versity of Rio de Janeiro, at the begin-ning of 2015. “Experimental advances are very rare in quantum thermodynam-ics because of the need to control the quantum system and isolate it from the environment.” n Igor Zolnerkevic

Projectnational institute of Quantum information science and technology (no. 2008/57856-6); Grant mechanism thematic Project; Principal investigator Amir caldeira (unicamp); Investment r$1,384,811.24 (FAPesP) and r$5,700,000.00 (cnPq).

scientific articleBAtAlhÃO, t. B. et al. experimental reconstruction of work distribution and study of fluctuation relations in a closed quantum system. physical review letters. v. 113 (14). Oct. 3, 2014.

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which they received from it, generating

a positive energy balance. the extra

energy could be used to perform work

rESultSc

the experiment recorded temperature variations of billionths of a degree in carbon atoms with spin


Advances in eScience are changing the

traditional way of conducting science

There was a time when it was a problem for scientists to obtain the necessary data required for progress in their research. However, in many fields of knowl-edge, recent advances in information technology,

along with the democratization of computing, the expansion of computer networks and the proliferation of information sources, have directly resulted in massive production of data. This is occurring in fields as diverse as astronomy, which is inundated daily with thousands of images and data from celestial bodies captured by powerful telescopes; to mo-lecular biology, which has benefited from the emergence of high-performance genetic sequencing instruments; to ecol-ogy, which is aided by a variety of technologies and sensors that can precisely document changes occurring in different biomes. All of these advances have left researchers with a new problem: how to process, organize and view the avalanche of data that is obtained through such diverse means. In response to this dilemma, a new branch of science has gained much attention. Known as eScience, it uses mathematical models and computational tools to analyze information and increase research speed in other areas of knowledge.

“The idea of connecting traditional scientific practice with the access, use and processing of large amounts of data will change the way we do science and increase its potential. FAPESP is at the forefront of this process; at the end of 2013 we launched the eScience Program,” said Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz, the Scientific Director of the Foundation, during the Microsoft eScience Workshop 2014, held October 20-22, 2014

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Mentzel, Program Director at the Gor-don and Betty Moore Foundation, two U.S.-based organizations that operate programs supporting science.

“At the present time, every field of re-search is affected by the modern scale of data production,” said Mentzel, empha-sizing the importance of data scientists, which is the name given to those profes-sionals who pour over the enormous vol-umes of data generated by researchers, and use it as a foundation to produce new knowledge. “They are researchers who work between disciplines. They are bridge builders,” he said. At the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Mentzel heads a $60 million program designed to incentivize eScience initiatives. Rhody believes that scientists are witnessing a paradigm shift. “We are moving from a culture of data scarcity to a culture of data abundance.”

eScience, named as such in 1999 by John Taylor, Director of the Office of Science and Technology of the United Kingdom, is also known by other names, such as data-driven science or data-in-

Connecting computer science applications to phenology, which studies cyclical phenomena in plants

in Guarujá, on the coast of São Paulo. The objective of the eScience Program is to organize or integrate groups that are involved in research on algorithms, computational modeling and data infra-structure with teams of scientists work-ing in other fields of knowledge, such as biology, social sciences, medicine and the humanities.

GlobAl CHAllEnGE“One of the principal barriers we could face is communication problems among scientists on the teams needed to do sci-ence in this way, which is heavily based on data or large amounts of data. This re-quires very effective communication be-tween researchers in the computer sci-ence field and scientists in other fields. It’s a challenge in Brazil, as it would be anywhere,” Brito said. He was a partic-ipant in the roundtable on “The Stra-tegic Importance of eScience,” which also included scientists Jason Rhody, Senior Program Officer in the Office of Digital Humanities at the National En-dowment for the Humanities, and Chris

tensive computing. Some countries, such as the United States and England, al-ready have government-supported pro-grams focused on developing this new area of science. In Brazil, the Center for eScience Research at the University of São Paulo (USP), which was formally established in 2012, is worth special mention. The center has 20 research-ers under the coordination of Roberto Marcondes Cesar Junior of the Institute of Mathematics and Statistics (IME) and one of FAPESP’s Supervising Panel on Exact Sciences and Engineering of the Scientific Directorate.

The Microsoft eScience Workshop 2014 was held in conjunction with the 10th IEEE International Conference on eScience, organized by the Computer Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), which was founded in the United States by electri-cal and electronics engineers. During the event, a panel discussion was held with researchers who have received grants from the FAPESP-Microsoft Virtual Re-search Institute and who connect com-puter science applications to the chal-lenges posed by basic science in areas related to climate change and other fields associated with the environment. One of the studies presented explores innovative solutions for monitoring plants in the tropics, combining computer science re-search and phenology. Phenology, which is one of the oldest branches of science, is an area of ecology that studies the cyclical phenomena of plants, such as the emer-gence of leaves, buds, flowers and fruit,


and the ways in which these phenomena are related to environmental conditions.

Under the coordination of researcher Leonor Patricia Morellato of the Phenol-ogy Laboratory at the Institute of Bio-sciences at São Paulo State University (Unesp) in Rio Claro, the project seeks to combine technologies to monitor the long-term changes undergone by plants native to the Cerrado, the Atlantic Forest, the rupestrian grasslands, and even the Caatinga. The central area of research is in Itirapina, in inland São Paulo State. “In addition to directly observing the plants at ground level, we installed a camera on top of an 18-meter tower to take daily photographs of the vegetation, and set up a meteorological station. We’re also going to have an unmanned aerial ve-hicle (drone) equipped with a hyper-spectral sensor and a camera to add a spatial scale to the data collection,” the researcher says. With high spatial resolu-tion, hyperspectral sensors can provide details about the physical and chemical properties and physiological responses of the plants shown in the images. Mo-rellato views phenology as one of the best tools for understanding the effects of climate change on plants. “This has already been established in temperate regions, where the phenological triggers are ambient temperature and length of day. But we know little about what hap-pens in tropical plants. With the data from the cameras and the hyperspectral sensor, we want to determine what the triggers are for phenology in the tropics, i.e., what causes flowers, fruits and leaves to emerge at certain times,” she says.

AnAlYzInG ImAGESAccording to Morellato, without the help of computer science researchers and re-sources, it would be impossible to con-duct the research. “The volume of data we will collect is enormous. One digital camera alone takes 60 photos per day. We have 11 cameras monitoring six types of vegetation, and we need to observe de-velopments for at least one growing sea-son in order to go back and connect them with the climate data. Then we need to process and analyze all the images, which would be impossible to do with a simple electronic spreadsheet. We need help to work with this big data. That is why we enlisted a masters student to create a database especially for the project, and

Wireless sensors installed in forests generate large amounts of data on natural processes

a post-doc to work on software for view-ing and organizing the images.”

The research collaborator for the Un-esp professor is scientist Ricardo Silva Torres, Director of the Institute of Com-puting at the University of Campinas (Unicamp), who is also working on a project under the FAPESP-Microsoft Research agreement. He is heading a study aimed at developing new analyti-cal techniques and computational tools for processing remote sensing images to enable scientists to analyze the dy-namics of some biomes on regional and continental scales. The research is being conducted in partnership with Profes-sor Marina Hirota of the Department of Physics at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), and it focuses on South American tropical biomes.

Another study presented at the event in Guarujá is led by Unicamp ecologist Rafael Silva Oliveira, collaborating with researchers Antonio Alfredo Ferreira Loureiro of the Computer Science De-partment at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) and Stephen Bur-gess of the University of Western Aus-tralia. “The goal of our study is to inves-tigate the water and carbon dynamics in cloud forests, pastures, and the transi-tion areas between them,” says Oliveira. Cloud forests are found at the tops of tropical mountains. “We want to under-stand how key processes, such as carbon

Projects1. Towards an understanding of tipping points within tropical South American biomes (no. 2013/50169-1); Grant mechanism research Partnership for Technologi-cal Innovation (PITe) and FAPeSP-Microsoft Agreement; Principal Investigator ricardo da Silva Torres (Unicamp); Investment r$384,838.38 (FAPeSP).2. Combining new technologies to monitor phenology from leaves to ecosystems (no. 2013/50155-0); Grant mechanism FAPeSP research Program on Global Climate Change – research Partnership for Technological Innova-tion (PITe) and FAPeSP-Microsoft Agreement; Principal Investigator leonor Patrícia Cerdeira Morellato (Unesp); Investment r$1,115,752.48 and $535,902.72 (FAPeSP).3. Soil-plant-atmosphere interactions in a changing tropical landscape (no. 2011/52072-0); Grant mecha-nism research Partnership for Technological Innovation (PITe) and FAPeSP-Microsoft Agreement; Principal In-vestigator rafael Silva oliveira (Unicamp); Investment r$644,800.74 and $663,429.82 (FAPeSP).

absorption and storage, transpiration of trees and the way plants capture water from fog, are affected by changes in land use and climate variations.”

The field studies are being conduct-ed in a section of forest along the Man-tiqueira Range, in the region of Campos do Jordão in inland São Paulo State. Ac-cording to Oliveira, a network of wireless sensors is being implemented there to monitor three layers of the ecosystem, the atmosphere, vegetation and soil, to determine the microclimatic parameters of plant metabolism and water dynamics in the soil. “These data could improve the forecasting of environmental impacts caused by changes in land use, and at the same time will make it possible to develop hydrological models and mod-els of biosphere-atmosphere circula-tion with greater predictive capability,” Oliveira explains. n


Foam consisting of graphene oxide

and boron nitride is lightweight and tough and

returns to its original shape after compression

New materials y

Malleable and bounces back

When associated with other molecules, the sheets of carbon atoms that form graphene can attain sur-

prising properties. A team of research-ers at Rice University collaborated with physicists at the University of Campinas (Unicamp) to develop a type of sponge that is extremely light, tough, and mal-leable. They made use of a chemical re-action that bonds graphene oxide (GO), a variant of graphene, to the hexagonal form of boron nitride (BN), a synthetic compound used as a lubricant and addi-tive in cosmetics. When small samples of this sponge were compressed with one or two pennies, they easily bounced back to their original shape. The nanometric structure of the new material, known as GO-0.5BN, is similar to the framework of a building under construction, with floors and walls that are self-assembled from a base of graphene oxide sheets reinforced with boron nitride platelets. GO-0.5BN is 400 times less dense than graphite.

Composed solely of boron and nitro-gen atoms, boron nitride molecules are arranged in a hexagonal configuration similar to that of graphene. The two com-pounds combine seamlessly, which pro-duces a tougher material with greater mechanical malleability. “The new ma-terial is chemically and thermally stable and can be used in energy-storing sys-

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would generate a new structure but not exactly one that had the ordered layered structure that we ended up with,” says electrical engineer Soumya Vinod from Rice University, first author of the report published in Nature Communications.

The hexagonal boron nitride plate-lets are uniformly distributed across the walls and floors that compose the inter-nal structure of the sponge. The plate-lets bind together the graphene oxide sheets that serve as a type of skeleton for GO-0.5BN. According to Vinod, the platelets absorb stress from compression and stretching and prevent the graphene oxide floors from crumbling or becoming cracked, in addition, they increase the compound's thermal stability.

No PAteNt Before discovering the chemical for-mulation of the sponge described in the paper, the researchers tested other ver-sions of the new material containing different percentages of the two ingre-dients. Whereas the group at Rice Uni-versity combined different quantities of powdered graphene oxide and boron nitride, Autreto ran computer simula-tions to predict the properties of the ma-terials under development in order to provide parameters that could be used by his colleagues to refine their experi-ments. “I was the only theoretical physi-

tems, such as supercapacitors and bat-tery electrodes, and it can also absorb gases,” says Douglas Galvão of the Gleb Wataghin Physics Institute at Unicamp, who participated in the study. “Boron ni-tride reinforces the structure of graphene oxide, which has a few gaps and can be-come brittle in certain points,” explains theoretical physicist Pedro Alves da Silva Autreto, who is conducting post-doc-toral research at Unicamp on a FAPESP fellowship and has spent time at Rice, where he performed computer simu-lations to predict the characteristics of GO-0.5BN. The process used to obtain the sponge and its properties was pre-sented in a scientific paper published on July 29, 2014 in Nature Communications.

Graphene oxide has essentially the same properties as pure graphene but is simpler and less expensive to produce, which explains why researchers prefer to use this variant of graphene in their experiments. It can be produced in large amounts by chemically exfoliating oxi-dized graphite. The presence of oxygen atoms in the hexagonal lattice of the gra-phene carbons provides the compound with an additional advantage: compared with pure graphene, it is easier to stack graphene oxide sheets and thus create layers that are both extremely tough and extremely thin. “We expected that adding boron nitride to graphene oxide

published iN october 2014

PesQUIsA FAPesP z 57

cist among 50 experimental researchers in Professor Pulickel Ajayan's group,” says Autreto, referring to his stint at the American university. The most stable version of the sponge was the one that had boron nitride accounting for half its final weight. The graphene oxide inter-acts with boron nitride via the action of chemical catalysts. The spongy material produced by the reaction is freeze-dried, and it loses its moisture through sublima-tion. The resulting foam takes the shape of its container. “Once we had the nec-essary amounts of graphene oxide and hexagonal boron nitride in hand, we took two or three days to produce the foam,” Vinod explains.

The nanostructured sponge, which retains its shape and can be used to store energy or absorb gas, has not yet been protected by a commercial patent. The partnership between Unicamp and Rice is expected to continue and to generate new projects. “Two post-doctoral re-searchers from our group will join Pro-fessor Ajayan's team in order to continue the collaboration,” says Galvão, who ad-vised Autreto in his master's and doc-torate work and is now supervising his post-doctoral research. n

projectstructural, mechanical and transport properties of gra-phene and related structures (No. 11/13259-7); Grant mechanism post-doctoral research grant; Principal investigator douglas soares Galvão (iFGw/unicamp); Fellowship pedro alves da silva autreto; Investment r$ 139,310.43 (Fapesp).

scientific articleviNod, s. et al. low-density three-dimensional foam using self-reinforced hybrid two-dimensional atomic layers. Nature Communications. 29 jul. 2014.

structural reinforcement

electron microscopy images show the layered internal structure (above) and a close-up of a supporting wall between sheets of graphene oxide and boron nitride

hexagonal boron nitride makes the graphene oxide sheets less brittle and prevents the inner layers of the material from crumbling

Graphene oxide

boron Nitride ● oxygen ● carbon ● Nitrogen ● boron

the sponge is internally composed of floors and walls that are self-assembled from a base of graphene oxide layers reinforced with sheets of boron nitride


Skin replacements could be

used as grafts to treat

burns and severe lesions

artificial skin

Engineering. She has a FAPESP fellowship and in September her study was awarded first prize for innovation at the 8th National Innovation Meeting on Drugs and Medicines sponsored by the Institute of Research and Development in Drugs and Medicines in conjunction with the Brazilian Pro-Technological Innovation Society (PROTEC).

“The treatment of burns and extensive and severe skin lesions is a challenge for regenera-tive medicine. There are some skin replacement alternatives, but none meets 100% of the demand and the need for proper healing of scars. Our goal is to create an artificial skin that can be absorbed by the body and solve chronic problems such as ulcers, deep scars and third-degree burns,” says Millás. “We want to develop a 3D skin replace-ment, which, in addition to its reparative role, also has a regenerative function, is aesthetically pleasing, and helps the healing process.”

The new artificial skin is produced from a solu-tion consisting of the absorbable polymer PLGA (poly-lactic-co-glycolic acid), copaiba oleoresin

A pproximately one million burn injuries are recorded in Brazil each year. Of these individuals, 10% seek medical attention at hospitals and 2,500 die.

Accidents involving fire are the second leading cause of infant death in Brazil and the United States. Therefore, the production of skin replace-ments in the laboratory for use as skin grafts has been a major focus of research in the last 30 years. Scientists in many countries are attempt-ing to develop a type of artificial skin that can be successfully applied to individuals with severe injuries. Here, in Brazil, the work conducted by a team of researchers at the University of Campi-nas (Unicamp) is noteworthy. In laboratory tests they have proved the effectiveness of a three-dimensional skin replacement produced using a substance extracted from a tree native to Brazil, the copaiba (Copaifera langsdorffii). Its develop-ment began during the course of doctoral studies in biology by Ana Luiza Garcia Millás, who is with the Department of Materials and Bioprocess Engineering at Unicamp’s School of Chemical

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copaiba trunk: raw material for oleoresin, which facilitates skin regeneration in the treatment of burns

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and a solvent. PLGA, which is widely used in the manufacture of implants, is gradually degraded and absorbed by the body. Once the polymer solu-tion is ready, it is converted into a fiber through a technique known as electrospinning. The struc-ture resulting from this process, referred to as a scaffold, will serve as a support or a three-dimen-sional cellular frame mimicking the architecture of the skin. Then, fibroblasts, a type of cell found in the dermis (the deepest part of the skin) are withdrawn via biopsy from the burned patient and grown on the fibrous structure, which a few days later is implanted in the patient.

According to Benedicto de Campos Vidal, emeritus professor at Unicamp’s Institute of Biology and an expert on collagen, the in vitro results achieved to date are very promising and have led to important findings: the cells are ad-

hering, proliferating, differentiating and appar-ently producing collagen, a key protein in the healing process. “Everything indicates that fi-broblasts are resulting in a collagen matrix. This is key to the success of the research,” says Vidal. The new cell structure functions as a support that allows the epidermis, the uppermost com-ponent of the skin, to proliferate. In addition to working with the patient’s own cells, Millás also plans to use fibroblasts from third parties. “The advantage of using cells taken from others is the ability to produce artificial skin on a large scale for a skin bank. The downside is the increased risk of rejection.”

A key aspect of this research is the electrospin-ning technique, which has attracted interest in the field of tissue engineering owing to its ability to produce ultrafine fibers with a high surface-

High voltage

Syringe

collector

Synthetic graftPrincipal stages of the development of the graft to be used in skin implants

SoUrcE ana luiza Garcia milláS / unicamP

1 2 3 4 5

poLYMEr SoLUTIoNThe first step is

the preparation of a

solution consisting of

bioreabsorbable

polymer pellets of poly

(lactic-co-glycolic

acid) (PlGa), copaiba

oleoresin and a

solvent

ELEcTroSpINNINGThe polymer solution is

placed in a syringe and

converted into fiber via

the electrospinning

technique.

The result is a fibrous

matrix (or scaffold)

formed by filaments.

The fibrous polymeric

scaffold is sterilized

with gamma or

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cELL cULTUrE in an oven at 37

degrees celsius that

allows gas exchange,

the patient’s

fibroblasts—the cells

responsible for collagen

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on the scaffold. after

attaching to the

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proliferate and

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it, through

connection to each

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layers to form a

three-dimensional

structure. This

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PlGa, copaiba oil and solvent

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skin (or replacement

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combined polymeric

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lesions, such as

third-degree burns,

ulcers and bedsores


to-volume ratio without the need for expensive and complex instrumentation. It is applicable to a wide variety of both natural and synthetic polymers and is also noteworthy for allowing control of the diameter, porosity and topogra-phy of the filaments. Furthermore, it improves the efficiency of the transport of nutrients between the fiber matrix and the external envi-ronment.

Another research innova-tion involves embedding a natural substance with prov-en, but insufficiently studied, therapeutic properties in the skin replacement. Copaiba oleoresin, which has been used for medicinal purposes since the 16th century, acts as a healing agent with analgesic, anti-inflammatory and anti-microbial properties. “This is an innovative aspect of the work, along with using a poly-mer to produce the matrix that will be applied to the lesion,” says Dr. Beatriz Puzzi, a der-matologist and coordinator of the Skin Cell Culture Laboratory of Unicamp’s School of Medicine and Millás’s doctoral super-visor. Embedding the copaiba oil into the matrix has a functional aim: to facilitate skin regenera-tion in the burn area. According to Millás, the substance collected from the trunk of the tree is referred to as an oleoresin because its composi-tion is approximately 45% volatile essential oils and 55% resin.

SKIN prINTErPreclinical testing in animals and clinical trials in humans have not yet been performed, but the group already sees an opportunity to produce the material on a larger scale, using 3D digital printers in combination with the electrospinning technique. The idea of using such printers arose from the need to scale up production of the mate-rial and to handle the requirements of the scaf-fold for the implant. “We have done some tests combining the two techniques, 3D printing and electrospinning. It may be an alternative because the matrices are extremely fragile and difficult to handle,” says Millás. “In vitro tests have already shown that the material is biocompatible and has great potential. I believe that clinical trials can be started within two years, and, if success-ful, marketing can begin in five.”

The Unicamp innovation is similar to two products from American companies: Apligraf®, produced by Organogenesis, and OrCel®, pro-

duced by Forticell Bioscience. Both use bovine collagen and human fibroblasts. Millás’s re-search grew out of a study begun during work toward her master’s degree in 2010, entitled “Using Electrospinning Technology for the Production and Characterization of Cellulose

Nanofibers Embedded with Natural Oil.” This work led to a patent that calls for the use of fibers produced via electrospinning technology and embedded with essen-tial oils not only as artificial skin and dressings but also as filters, fabrics and pack-aging for food and cosmet-ics. The development of the skin replacement was aided by a team of chemical engi-neers, including Professor Edison Bittencourt of Uni-camp’s School of Chemical Engineering, who is Millás’s doctoral adviser, and John Vinícios Silveira, in addition to professors Maria Beatriz Puzzi and Benedicto Vidal, also of Unicamp.

A portion of the development of the artificial skin was carried out abroad. In 2012, Millás re-ceived funding for her graduate studies from the international mobility scholarship program of Banco Santander; she completed a sandwich pro-gram, in which part of her studies were conducted in England. “Bob Stevens was my adviser. He’s a scientist and professor at Nottingham Trent University and a research collaborator at The Electrospinning Company. This company uses an electrospinning platform to develop fibrous biomaterials for regenerative medicine. While I was at the company, I made the decisions about which polymer to use and established all the cri-teria for the solutions and electrospinning equip-ment for producing the scaffolds. I also performed preliminary in vitro tests using primary lung fi-broblasts.” In 2013, Millás completed another sandwich program, this time with the Science Without Borders program at Cornell University in the United States. n Yuri Vasconcelos

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Projectdevelopment of bioactive scaffolds embedded with vegetable oils for skin tissue regeneration using electrospinning technology (no. 2012 / 09110-0); Grant mechanism Scholarship in brazil - regular - doctorate; Principal investigator Edison bittencourt (unicamp); Fellowship ana luiza Garcia millás (unicamp); Investment r$116,615.19 (faPESP).

Scientific articleYusuf, m. et al. Platinum blue staining of cells grown in electrospun scaffolds. Biotechniques. V. 57, no. 3, p. 137-41. September 2014.

In vitro tests have shown that the material is biocompatible. The next step is clinical trials in humans


Using leguminous

plants as fertilizer

can increase

sugarcane

production by 35%

although farmers throughout the world have long used so-called ‘green manure’– making use of the biomass of one type

of plant as a fertilizer for another type of plant – few scientific studies have in-vestigated how this approach functions and quantified its results. The search for those answers inspired agronomist Edmilson José Ambrosano, a researcher at the São Paulo Agency for Agribusi-ness Technology (APTA), affiliated with the São Paulo State Department of Agriculture and Supply, to conduct two projects supported by FAPESP. The research showed that sunn hemp (Cro-talaria juncea) can completely replace chemical nitrogen fertilization in sugar-

AgricUltUre y

Natural fertilizer

cane fields, resulting in a 35% increase in productivity and a financial gain of approximately 150%.

Originally from Asia, sunn hemp grows very quickly and vigorously. This species produces a high volume of biomass in a short period of time. In addition, sunn hemp is a fibrous plant that is also use in the manufacture of special types of paper.

One of the principal advantages of us-ing sunn hemp as a fertilizer is the fact that it is leguminous. Legumes are mem-bers of a family whose species are able to fix nitrogen, i.e., incorporate nitro-gen from the air into organic molecules. “With rare exceptions, legumes are the only plants in the vegetable kingdom that can accomplish such fixation from

atmospheric air. They do it with the help of bacteria found in their roots,” Ambro-sano explains. “Sunn hemp not only sup-plies nitrogen but can be used to restore degraded soils as well.”

Sugarcane is one of Brazil’s most im-portant crops. This semi-perennial plant can be grown from four to eight years on the same tract of land and can be harvest-ed every year. At the end of that period, the cane field is renewed by destroying the old plants and planting new ones. In Brazil, 1.9 million hectares of cane fields are renewed each year. “It is in those ar-eas, or in new fields, that green manure is sown to restore the soil by incorpo-rating nitrogen,” Ambrosano says. “We have been doing this in Brazil since 1934.”

Evanildo da SilveiraPUblished in december 2014

1


Plots planted with sunn hemp yield more biomass in less time than plots without sunn hemp (left)

experiment conducted at cenA, in Piracicaba, where 15n compounds were applied to sunn hemp (below)

The purpose of the study, which be-gan in 2003 and continued until very re-cently, was to study the effect of green manure on sugarcane. “We already knew that sunn hemp was a good fertilizer that functioned well as a source of nitrogen,” he recalls. “What we wanted to determine was how much of that element comes out of the plant and enters the sugarcane. We used the opportunity to verify the transfer of nitrogen found in ammonium sulfate, a very popular type of chemical fertilizer. Our idea was to compare the efficiency of the two types of fertilizer, the green one and the chemical one.”

(CENA) at the University of São Paulo (USP), produced a nitrogen compound that contained 70% 15N and 30% 14N. The next step was to prepare two plots of land, one measuring 2.80 m by 2.0 m and the other measuring 1.40 m by 1 m. Sunn hemp was planted in both plots. The first plot was sprayed with urea rich in 15N. The crop in the second plot received ammonium sulfate, also rich in 15N. The plants were then allowed to grow to a height of approximately 2 m, after which they were cut down and sug-arcane was planted in their place. The cane was cultivated for five years and harvested three times. The amount of 15N recovered was measured at the time of the first two harvests.

To carry out the assessment, Ambro-sano collected leaves from the experi-mental sugarcane plots and took them to the laboratory, where he used a mass spectrometer to determine the amount of labeled nitrogen, i.e., the amount of 15N from the sunn hemp. “The transfer of those elements from the sunn hemp to the cane in the first two (consecutive) harvests varied from 19% to 21%, and the transfer of nitrogen applied with ammonium sulfate was 46% to 49%,” says Ambrosano. “We concluded that the nitrogen from the application of fer-tilizer met the needs of the sugarcane, equivalent to using 70 kg of that element per hectare.”

Although the ammonium sulfate transferred more nitrogen to the sug-arcane, the green manure has other benefits that make up for the differ-ence. “In addition to being cheaper, sunn hemp protects the soil from heavy rains and decompacts it, thereby im-proving the infiltration of water,” says Ambrosano. n

Projects1.dynamics of nitrogen in sugarcane after green manure fertilization with Crotalaria juncea (no. 2006/59705-0); Grant mechanism regular line of research Project Award; Principal Investigator edmilson José Ambrosano (APtA); Investment r$36,860.00 (FAPesP).2. dynamics of nitrogen in sugarcane after green manure fertilization with Crotalaria juncea (no. 1998/16446-6); Grant mechanism regular line of research Project Award; Principal investigator edmilson José Ambrosano (APtA); Investment r$26,309.10 and Us$701.02 (FAPesP).

scientific article Ambrosano, e. J. et al. 15n-labeled nitrogen from green ma-nure and ammonium sulfate utilization by the sugarcane ratoon. Scientia Agricola. V. 68, n. 3, p. 361-8. June 2011. p

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NUclEAr MEthodTo conduct the study, Ambrosano de-signed an experiment using a technique known as isotopic labeling of nitrogen. Nitrogen is the most abundant element in the Earth’s atmosphere, accounting for approximately 78% of all of the gas that surrounds our planet, whereas oxy-gen accounts for 21% of this gas. In air, nitrogen is present in the form of N2 mol-ecules that are composed of two atoms in an extremely strong triple covalent (electron-sharing) bond. For this rea-son, animals and plants are unable to metabolize nitrogen.

Nature uses nitrogen through legu-minous plants with the aid of bacteria, especially bacteria of the genus Rhizo-bium. These microorganisms associate with plants in a symbiotic relationship, forming nodules on their roots where they capture gas from the air through the porous soil and convert it into ni-trogenous compounds such as amino acids that plants can use in their me-

tabolism. Fertilizer manufacturing repre-sents another way to convert nitrogen in-to a form that plants can exploit. Howev-er, the manufacturing process uses a large amount of energy, making manufactured fertilizer expensive for farmers.

In nature, nitro-gen is found as two isotopes, nitrogen-14 (14N), which accounts for 99.634% of all ni-trogen in the atmo-sphere, and nitro-

gen-15 (15N), which accounts for the remaining 0.366% of all nitrogen in the atmosphere. Isotopes are variants of a single chemical element that have the same properties and the same number of protons but a different number of neutrons. And so 14N has seven protons and seven neutrons, and 15N has an extra neutron, making it heavier. “That is why we had to think of a way to label what is present in sunn hemp so that we could verify how much of it would be used by the cane,” Ambrosano explains.

The study, conducted at the Cen-ter for Nuclear Energy in Agriculture

2


A study of 100 years of social

housing in Brazil uncovers high-quality

projects during the Vargas era

Architecture for all

The Gávea Housing Project in rio, by Affonso eduardo reidy, who also designed the Pedregulho Housing Project in rio in the early 1950s: social projects of historical and aesthetic significance

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pesQuIsA FApesp z 65

pesQuIsA FApesp 2XX z 65

While Brazil produced in-fluential, world-renowned architects and architec-tural landmarks during

the twentieth century—Oscar Niemeyer and Brasília being at the top of the is list—a large body of work in the area of social housing is less known and lies largely along the margins of official history. However, these works are not invisible or numerically insignificant. They are located in cities throughout Brazil, and their histories form a narra-tive with breaks, but also with a strong degree of continuity, going through cur-rent public policy in addition to creating a valuable repertoire of technical and formal experiments in architecture and urban planning.

The desire to illuminate and catalog the history of social housing in Brazil,

which has existed in this country for just over 100 years (since 1912), led to the preparation of the recently released three-volume book entitled Os pionei-ros da habitação social (The pioneers of social housing) by Nabil Bonduki, an architect and professor at the University of São Paulo School of Architecture and Urban Planning (USP-FAU) and a São Paulo city councilor who is a member of the Workers’ Party (PT). The core of the work, which is found in volume 2, is dedicated to the period stretching from 1930 to 1964, which spans from the time of President Getúlio Vargas’ first term to the military coup. “Back then there was a social housing cycle linked to the principles of modern urban planning,” says Bonduki.

While the 100-year period of social housing began with a federal govern-


conducted at FAU, which was submitted in the 1990s and supported by FAPESP, and led to the publication of the book As origens da habitação social no Brasil (The origins of social housing in Brazil) published by Estação Liberdade in 1998 and now in its 6th edition. That book explores the transformation of Brazilian cities during the Vargas era. Throughout his research career, Bonduki identified important architectural works built dur-ing this period that had rarely been stud-ied previously. His interest in expanding historiography on the topic grew from this observation and focused on “study-ing Brazilian modern architecture, es-pecially from the 1940s and 1950s, and how it related to social housing.”

The research project spanned 17 years (1997-2013) and was held at USP, initially at the São Carlos School of Engineering and later at FAU. It involved approxi-mately 40 researchers, several of whom eventually carried out their own studies on research topics that arose throughout the process. The key phase of the study involved a complete field survey of social housing production from 1930 to 1964 —the second of the three book volumes and the first to be finalized. The two ma-jor study projects received support from FAPESP, and the second, conducted af-ter the survey, was selected through a public call for proposals promoted by

Paquetá housing project in rio (left), built in 1952, and a building from the early years of Brasília: past attempts to harmonize housing projects and their environments

ment project in Marechal Hermes, a neighborhood in the city of Rio de Ja-neiro, that managed to complete 165 houses despite the presence of signifi-cant opposition, the upcoming Vargas era established a new culture and a different approach. “The idea of the social func-tion of housing was established; the State took on the role of addressing urban is-sues, and modernism became the lan-guage of this new period,” says Bonduki.

AdvAnces And setBAcksOverall, Os pioneiros da habitação social addresses both the foundations and prac-tices of a century of Brazilian housing policies and architectural advances and setbacks characteristic of the same pe-riod. The work, published jointly by Edi-tora Unesp and Edições Sesc SP, includes 1,208 pages illustrated with photos and figures. Volume 1, Cem anos de política pública no Brasil (100 years of public pol-icy in Brazil), recounts and comments on the history of public housing in Brazil. Projects built by social security insti-tutes, which were responsible for public housing during the Vargas era, are ad-dressed at length in the second section. Volume 2, Inventário da produção pública no Brasil entre 1930 e 1964 (Catalog of public projects in Brazil between 1930 and 1964), coauthored by architect and urban planner Ana Paula Koury, surveys

and documents 322 projects (in 24 states) of the period and includes figures of each on comparative scales. Volume 3, Onze propostas de morar para o Brasil moderno (Eleven housing proposals for modern Brazil), examines 11 of these projects in depth and presents three-dimensional models of the original designs and photo essays by Bob Wolfenson.

The basis of this study is rooted in Bonduki’s master’s and PhD research

According to Le corbusier, housing projects include public spaces, such as squares and schools

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Petrobras in the area of cultural heritage and documentation.

The research was carried out in col-laboration with Professor Carlos Ferreira Martins, director of the Institute of Ar-chitecture and Urban Planning at USP São Carlos (cited on the inner flap of vol-ume 2), and his team. Martins questioned traditional historical approaches to Bra-zilian modernist architecture, as they excluded certain themes and architects. According to both Martins and Bonduki, the trajectory of “more traditional” ar-chitecture, that focuses on housing for the masses, represents historical con-tributions that are as important as those of established names such as Niemeyer, Lúcio Costa, Rino Levi and Lina Bo Bardi.

Even an architect normally included in this group, Affonso Eduardo Reidy, was not well known for his work on so-cial housing, despite being the designer of projects of great historical and aes-p

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thetic significance, such as the serpen-tine Gávea and Pedregulho projects in Rio, which were both inaugurated in the early 1950s. Reidy was married to engineer and theorist Carmen Portinho, another cardinal name in the history of Brazilian social housing. Portinho was director of the Department of Public Housing, which was linked to the office of the mayor of the Federal District (Rio de Janeiro at the time) and which served as one of the few regional agencies that carried out major projects during Vargas’ first term (1937-1945). Later, during Var-gas’ second term (1952-1954), Portinho was a member of the Central Board of the Public Housing Foundation.

Forgotten By hIstorIogrAphyOne architect “missing from the domi-nant historiography,” according to Bon-duki, is Carlos Frederico Ferreira, who spent his entire career at the Industrial

Retirement and Pension Institute (IAPI), the public agency that was most promi-nent in producing housing during the Vargas period. He led the Architecture and Design Sector and, later, the En-gineering Division. “I was able to talk to him in 1994, six months before his death. No one knew where he was until I located him in the hills of Nova Fri-burgo, in the state of Rio de Janeiro,” says Bonduki.

During their conversation, Ferreira defined the IAPI’s central aim as “put-ting housing units within the reach of the majority of its members with modest salaries, that is, establishing the lowest price without sacrificing necessary hy-giene and comfort levels.” This advanced concern was in consonance with the principles established by Swiss architect Le Corbusier in 1933 at the International Congress for Modern Architecture, in-cluding, in the words of Bonduki, the

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first, the effect was positive for the low-income population, as this significantly decreased the percentage of salaries spent on housing.

However, this situation, combined with intense urbanization throughout Brazil (eight million city dwellers in 1930 grew to 32 million in 1960) led to a shortage of housing, swelling along the city fringes, a lack of public services and a wave of evictions. In short, a serious housing crisis ensued. At the end of this period, social security institutes did not come close to meeting the population’s housing needs, having built only 175,000 units. “The solution for the low-income

notion that housing “was not just a liv-ing unit,” but also included public spaces such as squares and schools. However, according to the researcher from FAU, this concept encountered considerable resistance in Brazil, beginning in the construction industry. “The issues that had to be addressed were basic, such as a lack of standards for producing a sim-ple brick—whose size depended on the origin—which made it difficult to build large-scale projects,” writes Bonduki.

Another influential architect of this period was Rubens Porto, who was an advisor to the National Labor Council and who established general directives for social security institutes and recommen-dations on housing project construction. In 1938, Porto published a book that pre-sented a series of solutions for such build-ings that involved streamlining all pro-cesses, eliminating all superfluous deco-rations and in turn delivering furnished homes, four-story multifamily buildings with stilts and two-story apartments. In practice, even when not following these precepts, most of projects developed by the institutes followed clear guidelines on urban integration and on the rational and industrial use of materials.

“It’s difficult to pinpoint the existence of a housing policy during the period, but

there were simultaneous actions that fit together,” says Bonduki. “The scenar-io consisted of several institutes with their own characteristics and teams, try-ing to ensure modernization and lower costs.” A “specialized techno-bureau-cracy” formed together with engineer-ing departments capable of formulating solutions to the challenges of creating low-cost, high-quality popular hous-ing. At a time when today’s construc-tion companies did not exist and when architecture schools were new, these departments acted, according to Bon-duki, like “large architectural firms” and “practical laboratories.”

Low-IncoMe popuLAtIonAccording to Bonduki’s study, nota-ble advances in architecture and ur-ban planning and the development of an inspiring legacy did not result in corresponding achievements in low-income family housing access. In the context of a transition from an agrarian society based mainly on the export of agricultural goods to an urban indus-trial, capitalist era, wherein the gov-ernment’s role became to protect the worker, private initiatives in the field of housing were discouraged by the Ten-ant Act of 1942, which froze rents. At

Bonduki believes that the government must seriously address land-ownership issues

Concentration of housing projects in São Paulo’s

east side (right) and Iguaçu Park, in Curitiba:

low quality both in terms of urban planning and

architectural design

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population was to take construction in-to their own hands, on the outskirts of large cities, establishing the model we see now,” says Bonduki.

Challenging the notion that Brasília, inaugurated in 1960, was a revolutionary project, Bonduki believes it represented the “end point” of experiments of the 1930s to 1950s, with its superblocks re-sembling housing projects designed in the 1940s. Additionally, social security institutes played a key role in building these residential areas.

new progrAMsFrom a political point of view, the new capital’s inauguration took place during a wave of vitality in the fields of archi-tecture and urban planning, achieved during Vargas’ first term. At the end of this period, a proposal called for the unification of social security institutes into a single agency and the transfer of part of its resources to an institution that would be established specifically to meet universal housing needs: the Popular Housing Foundation (FCP). Manage-ment teams of the institutes themselves and other sectors of society opposed the change, which would have deprived them of resources and privileges. In turn, the FCP was established without funds and, according to Bonduki, “its failure

set the formulation of a consistent hous-ing policy back by 20 years.”

The plans were resumed soon after the 1964 military coup, when pension funds were abolished upon the creation of the Brazilian Social Pension Institute (INPS, later replaced by the INSS) and National Housing Bank (BNH), which focused on housing construction and financing. It was a second-tier bank, meaning that it worked directly with other banks rather than with the public. It existed until 1986, when it was incor-porated into the Federal Savings Bank. However, inaction during the FCP pe-riod together with the dismantling of structures by the 1964 coup removed those institutions dedicated to social housing policy that really met the needs of the population. At that time, housing units were sold to future inhabitants and, while there was an emphasis on efficient mass production (4.2 million residences), project quality levels suffered greatly. By the conclusion of the BNH’s operations, during the period of redemocratization, the bank was related to ugly and poorly finished buildings.

Beginning in the 1990s, pivotal expe-riences at the municipal level foreshad-owed a series of advances in urban and housing policy, several of which were attributable to popular initiatives. This

was when the Statute of the City of the Ministry of Cities and National Housing Fund was instituted. This framework was auspicious and was strengthened by favorable demographic conditions, such as the diminishing of migration from the countryside to the cities and decline in the rate of population growth.

Political issues, however, led to the 2009 establishment of the My House, My Life federal program, which Bonduki feels is very limited. He stresses the cur-rent existence of “a very robust, healthy system of financing and subsidies with its own sources.” However, he affirms that “they tried to tie job creation and economic growth to the housing agenda, without dealing with land-ownership and urban questions, generating con-tradictory results.” Bonduki forecasts increasing problems related to mobility, safety and the environment as a result. He believes that the government must urgently prioritize quality over quantity as the “pioneers” did and that in order to do this, land-ownership problems must be adequately addressed. n


Population figures show that communities on the periphery of Greater

São Paulo have become more heterogeneous, with middle and lower classes

living closer to each other while the elites still occupy the more exclusive zones

Rearrangements in the Metropolis

The 21st century changes in patterns of residential seg-regation in Metropolitan São Paulo did not occur as it was anticipated at the end of the

last century. Residents of the metropolis are still highly segregated, but the way it happened has not followed the expect-ed trend that pointed to polarization of spaces and social structures. While the areas inhabited by elites have become more exclusive than ever, the rest of the city has undergone a change, becoming more heterogeneous. “The hypothesis of social polarization, expressed in famous metaphors such as ‘a divided city,’ is still alive, but did not prove true in São Paulo,” says Eduardo Marques, a researcher in the Political Science Department at the USP School of Philosophy, Literature and Human Sciences (FFLCH-USP) and researcher at the Center for Metropoli-tan Studies (CEM), one of the Research, Innovation and Dissemination Centers (RIDCs) supported by FAPESP. “The dy-namics of the social structure did in fact point to the occupational polarization of the 1990s, but that trend was completely

reversed in the first decade of the 2000s. Compared with forecasts, the metropolis has changed less, and in a different way.”

The research confirms the picture that emerged during the 1990s and associates the major urban trends with transforma-tions that have taken place in capitalism since the 1970s, such as the formation of a social group of the super-rich and the creation of protected compounds as homes for the captains of business. However, studies of changes in São Paulo in the last few decades did not conform with the effects of de-industrialization that began during the period, such as the curtailment of intermediate scale pro-duction activities, particularly the Ford model of industrial mass production.

The presence of industry in Greater São Paulo has diminished in relative terms in favor of re-tail trade and services, a sec-tor that generated 800,000 jobs regionally during the 2000s. This trend was not because of the dwindling of industrial activity as ob-served in other countries,

SOCIOLOGY y

but rather because factories have relo-cated to other regions, such as the macro-metropolises of Campinas and São José dos Campos. Furthermore, the effect of continued Ford-style mass production has been that these workers (skilled man-ual labor) are the most numerous social class in the metropolis according to the 2000 Census, although they are “in a de-cline associated with the growth of the professional class and the middle strata.” These trends have a significant impact on the map of social segregation: the classes that have grown the fastest proportion-ally tended to disperse during the first decade of the century, while those that declined in number (the wealthiest class) increased their exclusivity.

Marques arrived at these conclusions through a study that used census data from 1991, 2000, and 2011. An article on the subject, entitled “Social structure and segregation in São Paulo: Transformations during the decade of the 2000s,” was published

In downtown São Paulo, a building occupied by the homeless (at rear), close to a Metro stop, is reflected on the windows of a recently renovated building: the city has changed less than anticipated and in a different way

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Overall, the elites exhibit the highest indices of segregation and the middle classes exhibit the lowest.

This analysis provides evidence to support the limitations of the social po-larization hypothesis: the local effects of global processes are not always the same. “In Brazil, after the restructuring of the 1990s, the current century has brought the return of employment, growth in the formal labor force, and the improvement of wages,” says Marques. “That, added to changes in the patterns of demographic growth and the government’s investment in infrastructure, accompanied by a bet-ter distribution of construction activity, contributed to the heterogenization of the periphery.” Marques observed that the studied period predated the launch of the federal program My House, My Life, which has produced approximately 130,000 housing units in Metropolitan São Paulo since 2009.

As a statistical parameter, Marques used the EGP (Erikson, Goldthorpe and Portocarrero) classification, adapted to Brazilian circumstances. The EGP clas-sification is a method of grouping occu-pational categories to observe “milder, more continuous and durable” fluctua-tions than those based solely on educa-tion or income, for example. Another ad-vantage of the EGP classification is that it provides common ground for interna-tional discussions. One of the activities of the CEM is to perform comparative research on international patterns of public policies and governance among São Paulo, Paris, London, Mexico City, and Milan. The main CEM offices are at two sites: one at FFLCH-USP and the other at the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning (Cebrap).

houses in Paraisópolis, with buildings in Morumbi in the background: enclaves of manual workers in the territory of the elite

in December 2014 in the journal Dados by the Institute of Social and Political Studies (Iesp) at Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ) and will make up several chapters of a forthcoming book São Paulo 2010: Espaços, heterogenei-dades e desigualdades na metrópole (São Paulo 2010: Spaces, Heterogeneities and Inequalities in the Metropolis), sched-uled to be released by Editora Unesp in May 2015.

With respect to the distribution of housing throughout the metropolis, the study detects both a pattern of so-cial avoidance confirmed by the index of dissimilarity and the Moran’s I Index value (measures of residential segrega-tion) and a proportional distribution of classes in the metropolitan region. “It’s not simply a group that isolates itself, although the elites really are the most segregated groups; rather it is a charac-teristic of the very structure of segrega-tion,” says Marques. “The data suggest, rather eloquently, that the greater the so-cial distance between classes, the greater the degree of segregation, suggesting a pattern of avoidance in the residential choices made by groups who can pay higher prices for the land.” This con-clusion is consistent with anthropologi-cal and sociological studies that address subjects such as the use of public spaces in cities, gated communities, and the rise of shopping malls.

In addition to its high intensity, seg-regation is also strongly hierarchical,

as evidenced by the data measured by the index of dissimilarity. “The degree of differentiation is arranged perfectly by class,” says Marques. That progres-sion results in minor dissimilarity be-tween any one group and its contiguous groups, but much greater dissimilarity between groups that are distant in the structure. Another significant deduction found in a chapter by Danilo França in the upcoming book is that segregation is not only socioeconomic, but also ethnic-racial, with the latter superimposed on the former, in much the same way as a combined hierarchy appears when si-multaneously considering social class and skin color.

This apparently paradoxical phe-nomenon is one of the factors be-hind the increasing heterogeneity

of the outskirts of the city, which has already been studied in the literature as “physical proximity and social dis-tance.” For example, this process oc-curred due to the increased popularity of gated communities in peripheral zones, which themselves were already hetero-geneous because they served the peo-ple in the variable income strata found between those at the top of the income structure and those in the middle class. In Greater São Paulo, this phenomenon had a tremendous impact on peripheral areas such as the municipalities of Ba-rueri, Cotia, and Santana de Parnaíba.

In terms of dissimilarity indices, the spatial distributions of the middle class closely resemble those of the lower classes, thus reinforcing the finding of a mixed fabric in Greater São Paulo with the exception of the intense segregation of the classes at the top of the structure.

pEsQUIsA FApEsp z 73

in the eastern zone (Zona Leste) of the city of São Paulo.” The historical center of the city is predominately mixed-mid-dle class, demonstrating how the region has changed since the 2000 census due to an influx of lower-income individ-uals. The expanded city center occu-pied by the elite is situated southwest of the historical downtown, including neighborhoods such as Higienópolis, Pinheiros, Jardins, and Morumbi. Be-tween 2000 and 2010, that area came to include regions located in the direction of São Paulo’s industrial area known as the “ABC” due to the expansion of Mo-rumbi and Vila Leopoldina, areas that have experienced a construction boom in the new century.

That southwestern region contains two enclaves of manual laborers situated in the midst of the terri-

tory of the elite. These are the only two large slums (favelas) located within the limits of the expanded center—name-ly, Paraisópolis to the west and the He-liópolis-São Jóão Clímaco complex to the southeast. In sharp contrast, the re-gions of Tatuapé and Santana are now al-so occupied by the elite. Both are rather small and lie to the east and north of the territory where the elite are concentrat-ed. The centers of Guarulhos and Mogi

In the foreground, the skeleton of a building in Vila Leopoldina in the western zone of São Paulo. In the background, new buildings that rose during the real estate boom of the early years of this century

Using the EGP classification, in the mixed middle/low class spaces char-acteristic of the heterogeneity observed in the peripheral regions, 71.6% of the population belongs, on average, to the classes of manual laborers (both skilled and unskilled), low-level manual labor-ers performing routine tasks, and tech-nical and supervisory personnel. Rela-tive incomes in those areas fall between middle and low. This population features a high percentage (40%) of blacks and browns (pretos and pardos) who live pre-dominately in houses (only 9% lived in apartments). Infrastructure conditions were close to the average conditions for the metropolis (sometimes even better, depending on the indicator).

In the geographical configuration of Greater São Paulo as revealed by the 2010 census, the mixed-middle-low class spaces are situated in the periph-eral regions, “although with spatial dis-continuities and a substantial presence of mixed-middle class spaces, especially

ProjectCeM – Center for Metropolitan Studies (no. 13-07616-7); Grant mechanism Research, Innovation and dissemina-tion Centers (RIdC); Principal Investigator Marta arretche (FFLCh-uSP); Investment R$7,124,108.20 (for the entire project) (FaPeSP).

Scientific articleMaRQueS, e. estrutura social e segregação em São Pau-lo: transformações na década de 2000. DADos-Revista de Ciências sociais. V. 57, no. 3, pp. 675-710. 2014.

das Cruzes, to the northeast and east, respectively, are now home to the up-per middle class. Areas near downtown Guarulhos have experienced an influx of lower class individuals.

Marques’ study is part of a more com-prehensive, longer-term research proj-ect under way at the CEM. The book scheduled to come out in May 2015 com-plements São Paulo: Segregação, pobre-za, e desigualdade (São Paulo: Segrega-tion, Poverty, and Inequality), edited by Marques and economist Haroldo Torres and published in 2005 by Senac. Based on 2000 census data, that volume, like the future one, consists of coordinated chapters on subjects such as popula-tion growth, segregation, and access to public policies. Additional material has now been included to discuss aspects associated with the labor market, race, and urban mobility. n Márcio Ferrari


Stars of zincA cluster of tiny blue stars reveals zinc oxide that crystallized

in the presence of gold nanoparticles. In the expanded image,

a star’s broken arms (blue) and gold at the center (yellow)

are visible. The images are of field-effect transistors and were

obtained using a scanning electron microscope. Images were

magnified 80,000x and digitally colored by Eder Guidelli,

doctoral candidate at the School of Philosophy, Science, and

Languages and Literature (FFCLRP), University of São Paulo

(USP) at Ribeirão Preto. Guidelli, under his advisor, Oswaldo

Baffa, is studying the applications of nanotechnology in medical

physics to develop nanomaterials for use in X-ray detection.

The images were finalists in the Science as Art competition

at the 2013 Materials Research Society Fall Meeting in Boston.

Images submitted by Eder Guidelli of FFCLRP-USP

Art

PUBLIShEd In SEPTEMBER 2014

object of desire

Documents